Stories

At least four times a day, Daisy tilts her head, scrunches up her nose, smiles a funny little pursed-lip smile and asks me to tell her a story about when I was a little girl. 

“You tell me a story when you were little girl?,” she says. And she draws out the word ‘girl’, like being a little girl is a state of being full of wonder and enchantment. 

Yes. It is.

I draw a blank. For stories in our house, we ask her Dad. He’s got it–a memory brimming with adventure and life, real life! Hunting black scorpions hiding under sun-scorched rocks with his bow and arrow. Riding a little 50cc through the Mara, crashing because he’s watching a giraffe run a gangly, graceful run. Catching Nile perch weighing more than he did. Smuggling a pair of hedgehogs through international airports. The dog being taken by a 16 foot python one Christmas Eve. A gecko attaching itself to his cheek. Snatching red-eyed crocodiles from their watery home with one quick grab with a bare hand. The pain of a fish spine impaling the flesh between his thumb and finger.

“One day, when I was a little boy…” And she’s gone, sunk in his world, swimming in his river and riding on the back of his motorcycle, flying over herds of giraffe and landing on bumpy strips of far-away red dirt.

I look at her little expectant face. I haven’t got snakes and scorpions and motorcycles and mud holes in my repertoire of stories. I’ve got sitting at a lunch table, shoving as many grapes in my mouth as possible and laughing, spewing grapes all over the face of my 2nd grade best friend Joel. I’ve got skating precariously around a roller rink, only to be run over from behind by an unfortunately enormous man. I’ve got a family cross-country trip, the one where I continually fall to pieces because I fully believe my brothers when they say they will throw me off the Grand Canyon for talking too much. I’ve got breaking my wrist on the swinging bar at the park, walking home crying with my sister because I’m too scared of the creepy neighbor man to accept a ride in his truck. I’ve got pedaling full speed down my driveway on the blue Big Wheel, ramming into my mother’s white freezer with the dented door. I’ve got the neighbor’s Dalmatian dog, the terror of the neighborhood because of his reputation for hating the color ‘blue’. 

She looks at me. She’s waiting. It doesn’t matter what story I tell. She just wants a story. She wants the rise and fall of my voice as I talk to her, just to her. The ordinary of me becomes the wonder of her. And the wonder of her, well. For that, I’ll talk forever. 

I open my mouth and begin.

“One day, when I was a little girl…”