No matter your age, you probably have been subjected to the stories of those older than you.
Whether someone who is just a few years senior or someone well into the autumn of their years, the stories are shared with excitement and vigor.
When we are children, we don’t realize the importance of these stories. We don’t realize until we are older that the stories have just as much value to those telling them as those listening. It’s not always about telling a tale you want someone to hear, but telling a tale you love telling so much that you want to share the emotions of the event with those around you.
We, as young folks, never seem to grasp that until it’s too late. I am a father and a grandfather now, and some of the stories I tell are my own. Some of them are from the generations before me. I haven’t written them down because that would, at least in my mind, take away from the special nature of the stories and how they are passed down.
I’ve told the story about how my first real date was pretty much a disaster. For laughs, I have told the tale of how my brother, a friend and I managed to collect scores of Thomas’ English Muffin samples that were hung on the doorknobs in our neighborhood and horde them in our friend’s fort. Without telling the whole lengthy story of the Great Crime of 1976, I can tell you dry, untoasted English muffins aren’t too tasty, especially when you are dividing up about 60 of them amongst three boys. Nowadays, you couldn’t do that. Everyone has cameras on their porches and no company hangs food samples on people’s doorknobs anymore.
We share photos and stories in our family. As mentioned before, we have dozens of boxes of photo albums and loose pictures. We often take them out and share the stories of the snapshots with friends. Some stories are fun. Some are sad. We share them regardless. Nowadays, with social media, it makes it hard to tell the stories behind the pictures. We live in an instant society and take pictures of everything. Admittedly, I do as well. I have more pictures of dumb things than I do of anything else these days.
“This is a picture of my grandfather just after the war. He had a ’41 Oldsmobile with an automatic transmission that he would race with his friends.”
“What’s this?” someone would ask about a picture I had on Facebook.
“That’s a fried egg.”
“What’s the cool story with the fried egg?”
“I put it on toast and ate it. That’s it.”
“Why a picture?”
“Social media. That’s what you do.”
“Is that a dog lifting its leg on a bus tire?”
You see how this goes?
The stories have all but disappeared. Will there be stories passed down to the younger generations? I hope so, because stories have been passed down for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The advent of social media has all but killed the art of storytelling. Get online at any given moment and you can see people’s activities in real time, as it happens.
Decades from now, we will be telling a story and it will begin with “Remember when I FaceTimed you when you were killing that truck-sized spider in the garage?” All of our events are shared electronically. We won’t need to tell the stories, because in an age of oversharing, all you have to do is get online and look at someone’s internet history.
I’m hoping my daughters will remember the stories I tell them and pass them on to their children. I’m hoping the tales shared to me by my grandfather will be told decades from now. The details might be a little fuzzy and maybe even a little wrong, but it’s just fine. As long as the story gets told.
Joe Weaver, a native of Baltimore, is a husband, father, pawnbroker and gun collector. From his home in New Bern, he writes on the lighter side of family life.
