When your family gets together, what are the stories you always tell, over and over again, laughing every time? Some of my favorite times with my family are exactly that--sitting around a dinner table after all the dishes are cleared away, and re-telling our old stories. Even though we all know these stories by heart, there's just something reassuring about their telling.
This week, when Mama Kat suggested writing about my Top 10 Life Stories, I jumped at it. I thoroughly enjoyed walking down memory lane a bit--visualizing my family around the table, laughing till crying as we tell these familiar stories...
1. Sometimes people you've never met and their stories are a part of your Life Stories...like Brother Mose, Sister Bobby, and the meat cleaver.
2. The home where I grew up had a history and its own stories, and it all became woven into my own Life Stories. Its name in our stories? Simply "1800."
3. You can't pretend you're tough when you have drop seizures every time your mom or dad is wearing a gorilla mask hiding in your closet.
4. Booby-trapping my brother's room, setting his cuckoo clock for midnight, sliding hard books underneath his bed sheets...and finding out paybacks aren't fun.
5. The Soup Kitchen was about learning to serve all kinds of people--scary looking people, the toothless old gentleman who always wore a 3-piece suit, women with shy little kids we'd play with and try to draw out, and big smiley Jimmy, who always had a jolly word, and who walked everywhere he went in town.
6. Working in the yard as a family meant I was the self-designated "drink getter" and "telephone answerer." And, as I always answer that story--Hey, those are important tasks, too!
7. Learning about forgiveness by taking a convicted rapist to church on Sundays, bringing him home to swim in our pool, and being encouraged to "be nice to him."
8. Anything tiny is "Aunt Mae sized," and any person large is as my Gram Moore used to say, "As big as a cow. A good-size cow."
9. Being in the band meant sitting in the stands never knowing the football score, and maybe even thinking the crowds were most excited about the half-time entertainment.
10. Even when you're tired of taking your little sister to every bathroom in every store you're in, it's not okay to tell her the display bathroom in the middle of the hardware store is okay for her to use...
What are some of your own favorite Life Stories?
(You should really try to write down your Top 10. It's a wonderful exercise!)
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