Wander, Coming Soon

My dad was a storyteller. I didn’t think of him that way when he was alive, but after he died all my best memories of Toby were of him sitting at the table or on the front porch or with buddies at the local tavern telling a story. Usually it ended in laughter – he loved to tell my hubs stories about me, like the time I went for my first bra, a 28AAA, and told the clerk, “I’ll need a bigger size next time.”
Sometimes, too, it would be one of those tales that left him shaking his head over some inexplicable woe he just didn’t understand.
My mom didn’t tell stories so much, but every morning before she went to work, she left notes for me and my sister written in longhand, usually on a yellow legal pad. In them, she would tell us what to cook for dinner or to take care of some household chore. Often, they’d be accompanied by a few bucks for a cold soda or ice cream. Once after she’d grounded me for the entire summer, she wrote, “And please tell Lori to behave. She knows I hate to punish her.” The grounding lasted two days.
Between my dad’s verbal tales and mom’s written notes, it seems natural now that I would become a writer. I asked for my first diary at 11, started a journal at 14, wrote my first poem the same year, and at 16, asked not for a car but a typewriter, and received a yellow Smith Corona in a brown plastic zippered case. I already had the portable my mom’s boss had given her when he retired. It was a Remington Noiseless Model Seven and came with it’s own carrying case. It was – and still is – missing the M key. I’d been banging around on it since I was 5.
Writing for me was never a choice. It just is and always has been what I do. I think it may very well be how I cope with life, how I process it, make sense of it. And I love it, but damn, it is a hard way to make a living.