Monsters under the bed swirl with memories of spills and tears and prizes held high — each time we recall and recount our childhood something new is revealed. These building blocks of stories remembered and told turn like gear in the heads of this week’s storytellers. As I read, I am reminded of my own pigtails and skinned knees.
Hannah Brophy’s pen touches down with wit and a wee bite as she describe life in a Texas town known for oil and the Air Force base. Her previously published Traditions cast light on the role that the debutant ball played in her hometown — and the expectations that she too would be a white-gowned participant. Crazy Families scratches further below the surface:
This seems to be a nice room of people. I'm sure everyone here comes from a text-book perfect family with Norman Rockwell-inspired holidays. Unlike you, I come from crazy people, whose one claim to fame is that they never forget.
Ricky Fay spins yarns about the Family Fay a boisterous rabble of traditionalists (see We-Cut and Taking the Subway Home), who seem to make one another laugh with the slightest of provocation (see Meow and An Overwhelming Sense of Security.) Those of you who have been reading him regularly know that in addition to an aside — the long pause — and exuberant punctuation!! Ricky makes use of the footnote, which sadly Substack’s formatting leaves us with no option but to stack them up as endnotes. This week, we confront monsters under the bed and the super parent who tamed them in (In Honor of My Father on His 80th Birthday) Nightmare, Red in Tooth and Claw with a visual assist from Hieronymus Bosch:
So, after sleepless months during which I failed to convince our parents of the looming, fatal peril they insisted on ghoulishly ignoring, I began to accept that my frequent night terrors would be occurrences I'd just have to cope with on my own moving forward.
Phillip Luna’s The Worn Road moves us through the past and the imagined past, all colored in blue-glassed loss, as if grief was a window from which memories are constructed and replayed. He recognizes himself in the shape of his son’s eyes, and those of his mother, a recognition that shifts his perspective, but not enough to change the outcome:
But these memories are not real; they are the possibility of memories. They are just my empty hopes. I’m on the periphery of his life, sealed on the outside looking in and he is just a silhouette.
Time softens memories, blurring the edges to allow the storyteller to sharpen and shape the narrative to fit their perspectives, from Phillip’s blue lens: All the moments in my life I have lived twice — first on the outside, but later within. When the inside moment happens is when you say, “Wouldn’t it be nice to go back to the outside moment and try that again? | TDS
AND ON A PERSONAL NOTE: I have such a wonderful posse of friends who have celebrated birthdays this week, I love you all! And because you are Virgos … I know you have read to the end. xo tds