When I was a kid we lived in New York City, but every weekend we commuted to our Barn in southern Massachusetts. This was a three hour drive (plus, on the trip north, a stop for dinner), and my brother and I were kids, which is to say, not always patient. We did not indulge in “are we there yet” because I think we had a sense of just how well (or poorly) that would have gone over. But we did get antsy. The radio was a distraction, but at some point the signal from NY would get too weak, and we clamored for something else. My parents would consent to play games–Geography mostly. But best of all was when my father told stories.
Some of his stories were autobiographical. Or pretended to be: I am pretty sure that the story he used to tell us about having been mistakenly rolled in a rug one year during spring cleaning and forgotten until the rug was unrolled months later was, shall we say, a metaphor for what it was like being the second youngest in a family with eight children.
And then there was “Breakfast in Space.” This was a story told in many parts, from one week to the next (it was a serial, thus the punny title). It chronicled the adventures of a pair of siblings named Madeleine and Clem who went to Little Red Space School (my brother and I went to a Greenwich Village school called Little Red School House). I don’t, at this remove, remember a whole lot of details except for a long sequence where the students were out in their spacesuits playing some variation on tag, when my brother discovered that he could cheat by farting, the afflatus being expelled through the exhaust ports and… (hey, this story was pitched to a 9- and a 7-year-old, and this detail delighted us).
The other tale was Little Red Riding Hood. In my father’s telling, Grandma was a famed courtesan (the sort who would have fit in nicely with Desiree Arnfeldt in A Little Night Music) named Rosamond Gemutlich. Rosamond spent all her time in a glass bathtub, drinking champagne and dictating her scandalous memoirs about her time with a Graustarkian Princeling with a long Germanic name which my father pronounced with relish exactly one time before explaining “but he was known as “Franzu.” Rosamond’s granddaughter, also named Rosamond but called Little Red, would come to visit. Little Red had a bit of a smart mouth, and occasionally Grannie would smack her in the chops with a frying pan. If Grannie got too enthusiastic this would require a trip to the ER to enlist the services of Robert M. Clydesdale, M.D. (aka Young Doctor Bob)*. I don’t recall much in the way of plot for this story, but the details were outrageous, and doubtless pleased my parents as much as they did my brother and me. And yes, we were raised on Warner Bros. cartoons, so the notion of a grandparent hitting her kid with a skillet–often!–did not phase us.
The fact that my father would come back to one of these stories, week after week, both amazes and exhausts me. I’ve told innumerable stories to kids, many of them made up on the fly (when I chaperoned school field trips my kids would offer me up as sacrificial entertainment). I may have placed more importance on plot and an ending than my father did. But it’s a serious effort and takes a nimble mind. Oddly, as my mother was acknowledged within the family to be “the writer,” it never occurred to me to wonder why she was never the storyteller. As an adult, I realized that there’s a difference between being a storyteller and being a writer. My father was the former, my mother the latter.
It’s probable that those storytelling sessions didn’t last more than half an hour (but that’s a long time to keep leaping from story point to story point, wisecracking all the way). Replete with my father’s invention, my brother would fall asleep for the rest of the drive, and I would stare out the window, committing it all to memory so I could relate the story to a couple of friends at school who demanded I report back each week.
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*A few years later my father had to get some No Trespassing signs made up for our property, because in winter hunters–some of them neither bright nor respectful of property rights–would crawl all over the mountain looking for deer, and there was a very real danger of a shot hitting an unintended target. As a joke, he had some of the signs made up in the name of Robert M. Clydesdale, M.D. (Young Doctor Bob). My father was always his own best audience.