Twice Told Tales

Time is not a line, but a series of now-points. (Taisen Deshimaru)

I’ve heard it said that we are the stories we tell, and while I sense a deep truth in those words, in that thought, I also wonder if there might not be more to it…more to us. Could it be that, in addition to the stories we tell, we are also made up of the stories that are told to us? Much like the DNA our parents pass on, the stories they tell us surely must amount to something more than mere musings – more than simple comparisons of their lives to ours. How really can you know yourself, if indeed that is your goal, without knowing something about where you come from…about whom you come from?
For whatever reason, such inner exploration has always seemed vital to me, and thus I have listened intently whenever an elder…any elder…but most especially my elders have shared their stories with me. In this manner, I have grown to know them more fully and through striving to know them, I have met myself. Again and again and again.

I recall a fall evening in Anchorage, Alaska - close to fifty years ago now - when, as a child of seven, I begged my father to tell me a story before seeing me off to sleep. Tired from what surely must have been long hours “on duty” as a young obstetrician and gynecologist in a busy military hospital, he sat down on the edge of my lower bunk bed and began. “Once when I was a little girl…” More alert than he, I immediately caught his error and exclaimed, “Daddy! You were never a little girl!” We both laughed at his absurd blunder as he continued on with his tale, surely eager to see himself enjoying the slumber that he sought to coax me into embracing. So many years later now I don’t recall the story that followed, but I vividly recall the imaginative leap that those words of his – misguided as they might have been – encouraged in me. In the days that followed I told anyone and everyone who would listen about how my dad had started his story with Once when I was a little girl… reveling in the absurdity of such gender-bending as I enjoyed sharing what felt like a good joke. Now, looking back fifty years later, I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure that it was as much a joke as a subtle, ‘nigh incomprehensible truth.

Wasn’t it Blaise Pascal who mused, Le coeur a ses raisons, que la Raison ne connait pas…The heart has its reasons that Reason does not understand? With those weary words, perhaps my father was unconsciously sharing something beyond a passable bedtime story. Perhaps he was addressing a deeper reality that speaks of connection beyond reason, a connection of the heart. Perhaps he was inadvertently inviting me to join him at that intuitive place…in that psychic space where his reality meets and melds with mine. It’s an invitation my father has generously offered and I have gratefully accepted repeatedly over the fifty-five years we’ve shared on this planet, in this lifetime. I have been graced with my father’s stories – stories that have somehow become my own, not only through the retelling but also through the receiving. My father’s stories have become so much a part of me that I have reached a point where I can now say, “Once when I was a little boy…” and almost mean it. Permit me now to share a few with you…