The natural born storyteller...

I've been lacking on the posts. It's been kind of nuts lately. I've decided to post something I wrote a while back, one of my first writing assignments I came across it and thought I'd go ahead and share.

The gift of gab is both a blessing and a curse.

I have learned over the years lessons in appropriateness out of necessity and I have great stories in the Rolodex stashed in my brain. I come by storytelling naturally, if you’ve ever met my grandfather this is not something you would dispute.

Grandpa can tell a story in such a way that will make you believe even the most far fetched bullshit. I think it is in the way he constructs his sentences and the way he simply puts things into words. Call him a wordsmith, of sorts.

Grandpa’s stories have been a staple for me for as long as I can remember. He’s even gotten me into trouble a time or two because I happen to repeat one of his gems. Keep in mind at the tender age of nine I could not yet decipher fact or fiction - at least not from the master who could spin a yarn longer than that huge ball in Cawker City.

It was a lesson I would learn at an early age.

He can tell stories that make nuns blush, mechanics laugh and little old ladies shake their heads. He can tell them sitting outside the commercial building at the county fair, he tells them in the foyer of the Methodist church and he cracks up even the coldest of souls at a community function. He is a natural, and it is one of many gifts I have gotten from him.

I don’t always think of myself as a storyteller, but I’ve been told several times that I have inherited that gift. That gift has made me want to write all of them down so I can share with other people this ‘way with words’ as some call it.

I can still remember grandpa’s first story. It’s hard to forget. My aunt and her family lived 30 miles to the west of our hometown when we were very young. We would often ride over for supper or to celebrate birthdays and although a short distance, 30 miles can seem like an eternity to a youngster. In order to pass the time grandpa told us the story about our Uncle Arrowhead, an Indian chief from the days of buffalo roaming the plains and smoke seeping from animal hide tepees. The chief was a man of few words and a single tree to the north of highway 36 marked his grave site.

Of course we weren’t of Native American decent, but I didn’t know that at the time. Grandpa said it was true, so it was. I never questioned his logic, or his theories whatever he said was the way it was. To this day I still pass by that spot and that is the first thing that comes to my mind. I picture a wrinkled Indian chief, smoking a piece pipe, wearing a headdress straight from Custer’s last stand – exactly how grandpa described him.

The most famous of grandpa’s stories got me into hot water in the third grade. We had been at grandma and grandpa's for our normal Sunday supper when he told me that grandma had made frog legs. Keep in mind that at the time I was unaware that the meat on the platter was simply chicken. When I shook my head and laughed in disbelief he backed up his story with facts, loose facts.

They were in fact frog legs he had himself harvested off of our pasture pond. He went on to tell me that the temperature had dropped so fast that morning the frogs had no time to make it clear to the bottom of the pond and burrow into the warm mud this left legs sticking out of the frozen pond top. Grandpa was an opportunist so he took our riding John Deere lawnmower and mowed off the frog legs, brought them home and grandma fried them up.

My teacher didn’t see the story as humorous the next day at school. In fact, I’m pretty sure I had to deliver one of those dreaded ‘handwritten’ notes home explaining my fascination with frog legs and my wild imagination.

Little did they know grandpa was fueling a creative drive that would finally surface at the age of 25, but grandpa knew and he was feeding me information for future reference – fueling an imagination only he could relate too.