I Told My Brother Stories

Wish I was still that cute.

                                                                                I told my brother stories

                                                                                when we were tucked in bed.

                                                                                I told my brother stories

                                                                                I made up in my head.

                                                                                I told my brother stories

                                                                                after we had said our prayers

                                                                                and our father kissed and left us

                                                                                in the room we shared upstairs.

                                                                                I told my brother stories

                                                                                when tell me a story I’d hear.                                           

                                                                                We should have been asleep but

                                                                                he’d beg from his bed so near.

                                                                                                                                               

                                                                                I told my brother stories

                                                                                Once upon a time, I’d say

                                                                                or continue one I’d started

                                                                                before sleep took us  away.

                                                                                I told my brother stories

                                                                                in a voice so soft and low

                                                                                so our parents couldn’t hear us

                                                                                in the living room down below.

                                                            I told my brother stories

                                                                                when we were tucked in bed.

                                                                                Now those stories are all gone

                                                                                that I made up in my head.

In almost all interviews of writers the question is asked “When did you start writing?” So many writers say they started writing when they were quite young – eight or nine, even. I didn’t start until I was a teenager, and even then it was only in a three-ring binder used as a journal, one story about a great-aunt and several poems. It seemed that I should have been writing in my classes at school, but I can’t remember being assigned an essay or anything that involved writing. In case it was a faulty memory, I asked my cousin’s husband, who was a year behind me in our school. He had to pause and think about it, and then said no. He couldn’t remember any of our teachers requesting written assignments. Then I asked a man at church who was a year ahead of me, and he didn’t think we’d ever written anything, either. In fact, I only remember two books assigned to be read; Ivanhoe and Romeo and Juliet, and there wasn’t a written assignment connected with this. As far as I remember we only discussed the books.

I might not have been a writer, but when I was quite young, my brother, Jerry, and I shared a room in the two-bedroom Cape Cod house my father built for us on a lot next to my grandparents’ farm, and I told him stories each night. In those years, we were sent to bed around 7:30, before the good shows on the radio came on like Inner Sanctum or Fibber Magee and Molly. Not that we didn’t often sneak down to sit on the steps  and listen, but we were usually caught and sent back to bed. My brother was sixteen months younger than me, and he’d ask me to tell him a story every night. More than likely I would have started with once upon a time, but from then on I made them up. I remember times when I’d pause to consider what would happen next in the story I was inventing, and he’d prompt me saying “What happened next?” I’d tell him “I’m thinking.” Sometimes we’d hear one of our parents downstairs telling us be quiet and go to sleep. If I fell asleep before I finished the story, or he’d fall asleep, the next night I’d continue that story and sometimes they’d stretch out for several nights or more.

My mother, father, Jerry and I

My sister Elaine was born when I was seven, and she slept in a crib in my parent’s room. When my mother became pregnant with my sister Suzanne my dad added a large kitchen/dining area on the back of our house and turned the small kitchen we had into a bedroom for Jerry, and then my two year old sister shared my bedroom and the stories I told my brother ended. I wish I could remember those stories, but I can’t. However, even if they weren’t written down, I still was a storyteller at that young age. Although we weren’t taught the rudiments of writing a story in school, apparently, all the books I read over my lifetime fired my imagination and made me into a storyteller and also taught me how to write those stories.   

My handwriting was so much better then than it is now.

The day after I’d written this blog above and sent it for review, I was cleaning out a cupboard in my library I hadn’t touched in years because there wasn’t anything I’d needed in there. It was sort of out of sight, out of mind.  Imagine my surprise when I found a somewhat tattered spiral composition book I thought had been thrown out almost forty years ago when our basement had flooded. In it were four short stories I’d written, seven poems and an essay on my nine best friends all written between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. Some of you may have read the blog I wrote this past May 8^th, “Serendipity, Coincidence or Whatever.” It’s certainly another example of that. I sat down and read the first short story. New Family is rather amateurish, but has all the elements needed in a short story; a fourteen year old girl is facing a problem which makes her unhappy and then the problem is nicely resolved in the end. I haven’t read Horror at Midnight yet, but it looks like even then I was destined to be a mystery writer.

When did you first start writing or telling stories?