All my life I’ve loved stories. My mother taught me to read when I was 3 and, well before I started school, I’d immersed myself in books and stories. I’m an only child, frankly it was a lonely life at times but stories were my companion. Now I am Aged, I still love to read but time and energy is limited. The days of curling up for hours and hours and hours with a good book are distant memories, alas. Not for a minute do I ever regret my children but one of the more painful casualties is reading. These days I manage 30 minutes or so a day. Pitiful compared with my Before Children life.
But stories don’t just come in the written form, far from it. And, of course, before writing and printing and all that jazz…stories were an oral tradition. It’s a dying art, the skill of the verbal story teller. Whoever does that these days, other than professional story tellers and camp fire aficionados? I’ve wracked my brains but I don’t think, in all my 40 years, that I’ve ever sat down and listed to someone tell a story off the hoof. I feel more than a little bereft about that to be honest.
That said, stories come in many shapes and forms. What I lack in formal story telling experience I make up for in the collection of ‘everyday’ stories. In short, I am a story catcher. This is the first time I’ve labelled it as such but I just happened to get to thinking about it, and realised that ‘story catcher’ is a most excellent expression for it.
I love your stories. I love the stories of people that I meet. I crave them and revel in them, I repeat them and cherish them. In particular, I love the CONNECTIONS between people. The six degrees of separation are so alive and well in my life that it’s laughable. The friend, on the other side of the country, who knows the friend I knew through school 25 years ago…the friend whose daughter who is friends with someone who lives in our village whose husband used to live in the house next to the house we used to live in…the friend whose daughter goes to school with Bertie who went to school with a friend I know through working with her in the 1990s…etc etc etc.
I’m nosy, I’ll admit it. And I talk a lot. And I like to talk, and people like to talk to me. I can generally get the basics of peoples’ life stories sorted in 10-15 minutes but, so I’m told, without any kind of aggressive or hard questioning. I ask the questions because I am genuinely fascinated and interested, more and more, to find the threads that bind you to me.
I was thinking about this earlier today, and how I actually love my ‘story catcher’ role. I’m no story teller, beyond my own tales, but I’m a respecter of the tradition of story telling and I passionately adore the ‘personal story’ tales which, after all, are the basis of every story. As I was thinking about it, a little bell of familiarity was ringing in the back of mind. I grubbed around a bit and then, with a little horror, realised that I’ve turned in to my grandmother.
As a child and young adult, her tales bored me. She knew the name of every person who lived on every street she had ever lived on…and their relationship to each other and connection with every other person in the town, or so it seemed. Conversations with her could be lengthy, and a little tedious if I’m honest, as she’d have to set the scene by giving the context of xyz person and how they fitted in to her oh..so…complex mental map. Another relation of mine (on the other side of the family) often used to marvel at her wonderful memory, and her amazing ability to absorb detail…and then retell tales with such colour and verve. I wasn’t convinced.
Towards the end of her life, when I was in my late 20s, I began to appreciate her absolutely astonishing gift for absorbing the stories of the every day…and catching all the threads that bound them together…plus her lively and compelling story-telling style. Alas I wasn’t absorbed enough to think to capture them, or record them in any way. Shame on me.
So here I am, 15 years on, slowly turning in to my grandmother. I live my life differently from hers. Her life was closely bound to her extended family, friends and neighbours…all of whom lived in very close proximity to her. My life couldn’t be more different in that respect. Despite that, I find myself slowly reeling in the individual threads of the stories around me…friends…neighbours…friends of friends…real life friends…virtual friends…family… acquaintances…I am basking in your tales…wrapping myself in their finer details, the good and the not so good. Daily I take up each loose thread and weave them in to my web of wonderful tales. I am the story catcher…the dreamer of dreams…the teller of tales.
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