Stories are a way of life

When I was a kid, my father told us bedtime stories. The five of us would get together in our pajamas and sit around on the biggest bed in the house, and Dad would turn the lights down or off and start talking. Unlike many parents who do this sort of thing, he never, to the best of my recollection, retold fairy tales or well-known books. No, Dad made up stories about Pee Wee Rabbit, and the Man With The Big Nose and his friends. It’s one of the memories all of us treasure about our childhoods.

Dad was the one who built us each a set of bookshelves in our respective bedrooms, and later lined the long hallway with bookshelves because the closets and cupboards were already full and we needed more shelves. My birthday present when I was fifteen was two and a half new shelves fitted into an awkward corner of the bedroom. That, and a couple of new hardcovers to put on them.

The science fiction paperbacks Dad left lying around the house were my introduction to the field. Later, every Sunday when we stopped after church to buy a paper, he let each of us pick a book or comic from the racks at the News Agency (and didn’t charge it against our allowances). We all had library cards as soon as we could sign our names for them, and once or twice a week we’d walk over and exchange the books we’d read for some we hadn’t. I don’t remember either of my parents ever telling one of us that we couldn’t or shouldn’t read something, though Mom did at one point offer my brother a bribe if he’d read all of Dickens, because she thought he was reading too much junk.

But it wasn’t just the books. We told stories around the dinner table, about things that had happened during the day. Mom and Dad both told stories about their families, including the one about umpty-great-grandpa James, who (family legend has it) was a British spy during the Revolutionary War, and the one about the lost gold mine in Peru, and the ones about the epic road trip my father and his brother took across the Rockies in their homemade jalopy when they were in their late teens. Dad’s story about Mom’s one mistake that bought 100 pounds of steel for an order instead of 1 pound did more than math class to impress on us the importance of getting the decimal point right.

Dad has always been supportive of whatever any of us chose to do. He doesn’t say much, but actions speak louder than words. He took us fossil-hunting when one of us got interested in dinosaurs, dragged huge boxes full of rocks home in the trunk of the car during someone’s brief enthusiasm for geology, and ferried my sisters long distances to art classes years before it was considered normal for parents to be driving their kids around like that. He talked my reluctant mother into letting me get my first cat. And he’s still supportive.  My books have littered the living room end tables for years, so that they’re easily available to show off to visitors, my sisters’ paintings hold pride of place on the walls, and the videotape of my one sister’s latest community theater production is always next to the tape player. If he could figure out how to show off my brother’s solution to a tricky engineering design problem, that’d be out there, too.

Dad taught us that doing our best was more important than what other people thought of the results. He taught us to listen carefully and politely to what other people say and then decide for ourselves whether it makes any sense to take their advice…and that usually, it doesn’t. He taught us to argue without taking things personally, and to watch out when he came around with that twinkle in his eye. He taught us that learning is fascinating and science is full of really cool stuff, and you never get too old to be interested. He taught us, by example, that following your dreams and having fun is far more important than making a lot of money, because you can always make more money if you run out, but you can’t bring back a dream that you’ve passed up for too long.

It is perhaps unsurprising that of the five of us, three are in the arts, while the remaining two chose to follow my parents into engineering. And all of us still tell stories to each other, our families, and our friends.

Happy Father’s Day, Daddy. I love you.