Family Stories

As we were driving to Daniel's school after dropping off Tab in Princeton this morning, the boys requested "stories," their term for the anecdotes I've told them about my childhood. I'm not surprised by their fondness for these family stories. When we were little, my sisters and I loved the stories my mother used tell us of her childhood. It was a little disconcerting, however, when we compared notes with our cousins and discovered that the stories our aunt told them differed greatly from those our mother told us. It was my first experience with the subjective nature of truth.

"Tell how Aunt Monica almost drownded," Matthew orders.

"And the lifeguard was talking to a girl and didn't notice," adds Stephen.

"You would be that lifeguard, Reno," I comment. At age four, Stephen is already a ladies' man.

"Tell it, Mama!" they urge.

"OK. This happened when I was young. My parents and my sisters Lori and Monica and our friend Mimi and I had all gone to the beach."

"Where was Aunt Sue?"

"She wasn't born yet. Anyway, we were playing in the waves, and Monica, who always was too daring for her age--"

"What's 'daring,' Mama?" interrupts Daniel.

"Ummm, adventurous, always doing things she shouldn't. Anyway, Monica went out a little too far and started to get pulled out by the undertow."

"What's an undertow?" several voices chime in at the same time.

I've explained it dozens of times, but I answer once again: "A kind of current under the waves. It's so strong that it could drag even a grownup out to sea, even a grownup who is a strong swimmer. Monica was being dragged out, and the lifeguard didn't even notice! He was too busy flirting with some girl in a bikini."

I pause, waiting for them to ask what a bikini is, but they don't. "Go on, Mama," Daniel orders.

"So our friend, Mimi, who was a good swimmer and had taken lifesaving classes, swam out to help Monica. But she couldn't swim in, either. The undertow was too strong for her. At least she could hold Monica's head up above water so she wouldn't drown."

"Why didn't you go out there, Mama?" asks Daniel, who would clearly love for his mother to be the hero of the story.

"Because I didn't swim as well as Mimi, Dans," I answer him. "And then my Dad--your Poppy, boys--heard Lori and me shouting and charged into the water. He got hold of Mimi and Monica and tried to swim for shore. But it didn't look like he was going to make it, either, until a big enough wave came by and washed them all in."

They're quiet for a moment, contemplating this. Then one of them pipes up, "Tell about Aunt Monica running away."

"Well, when Monica was a very little girl, no more than two and a half, she liked to wander off. Our yard wasn't fenced in, and Monica would just walk away. Usually Lori and I would find her running down the street, but once we looked and looked and couldn't find her.

"So my father had to get in his car and drive around the neighborhood looking for her. He finally found Monica many blocks away in another whole neghborhood."

"How did she cross the street without getting hit by a car?" asks Daniel.

"My family lived in a suburb, not the city like where we live now. It was a quiet neighborhood--there weren't a lot of cars. I'll take you there sometime and show you the house where I grew up."

"Me too, Mama?" asks Matthew.

"All of you." I continue the story: "After Monica ran so far away that time, my father built a kind of pen for her in the backyard under a shady tree. She had her toys in there and she could play, but she couldn't get out and run away. Sometimes my mother would give Lori and me animal crackers or vanilla wafers to take outside to her. We used to pretend that we were feeding an animal in the zoo. I was your age, Dans, about 6, and Lori was 5. Poor Monica," I laugh. "She doesn't like this story."

"Why not, Mama?"

"Because she thinks it was mean of Mom and Dad to put her in a pen. But I don't know what else they were supposed to do, the way she kept running off."

"Tell about the time Reno and I were little and you left the lights on the car, and the car got broken," Matthew begs.

"You mean when the car battery died?"

"Yeah," says Matthew.

"Not that one," says Stephen. "Tell about when the eggs were broken and you left us in the car and we got too hot."

"Hey, that didn't really happen!" I exclaim. "That was a dream I had."

"Well, tell it anyway."

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