Sunday, May 28, 2006

Storytelling

Dad was a lots of things, but foremost he was a storyteller. Most of the story is told you were likely to be complete cow manure, but he would have you believing it. However, some of the story he told were true to a point. When he introduced you to me for the first time, you were likely to hear a story about me hitting a kid in the head with a brick.

The basics of the story is this. We lived in Germany so I was at most 3 years old. Across the street from our housing was a playground. In the playground there was a sandbox. In the sandbox was sand that had little pieces of gravel type rocks. These rocks when they got in my hair were hard to get out and I got in trouble for getting this grit in my hair. This kid throw sand in my hair and I retaliated by hitting him with the first thing I could get... a stone. This is the story as told by Mom. I really have no memory of it (as I said I was 3 at most).

When my sister speaks of it, she says she told me to throw sand back in his hair and then I picked up the rock.

When my father told it, there was no rock. It was a brick and I didn't just hit the kid with it, I threw it at him from the across the sandbox and bloodied up his head. This is when my father (who watched it all transpire from the stoop) calls me over or walks over to get me (it changed). Of course, after that we quickly fled the scene of the crime.

If I heard the story once, I heard it 300-400 times, but to this day I can never tell it as well as my father did. No one told it like him.

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