“Grandma, tell me something sad from when you were a little girl.” Four (“and a half”) year old Bean is sitting behind me 
in the car, eating her snack and looking at the ocean beside the highway. I made a decision when I began driving her home from preschool that we wouldn’t listen to music, but instead use the 20 minutes to talk to each other. Sometimes we do. Other times she just sits quietly, mulling over her day and transitioning into the time we will spend together until her father comes to take her home.
“Tell Me A Story”
That day she made a completely unexpected request. “Tell me something sad from when you were a little girl.”
“Why sad?” I was stalling.
“Well, were you ever sad when you were a little girl?”
“I suppose I was, sometimes. I’ll have to think about it for a minute.”
We drive along the coast for a while.
“I’ve thought of something,” I finally say.
“My daddy and I used to go fishing sometimes at Princeton Pier. We’d get up really early, before it was light. He’d make tea in his thermos, and pack sandwiches and milk for me. Then we’d drive to Half Moon Bay and sit on the pier until lunch time with our fishing lines in the water.”
“What’s a thermos?”
We talked about that for a while. Then I told her about the time I thought I had caught a fish but all that came up on my line was a crab. I was very disappointed, even sad, because we had to go home then and I hadn’t caught any fish at all.
Bean thought catching a crab was very cool. She said she wouldn’t have been sad at all.
Since that day we’ve had lots of conversations about when I was a little girl.
Sometimes it’s “Tell me something happy from when you were a little girl,” and sometimes, because now we’ve talked about various times in my much-traveled life, it’s “Tell me about when you were a baby in England,” or “Tell me about when your mom and dad left you on the porch during the hurricane.” Or even, and she thinks this one is very funny, “Tell me about living in Australia with all the kangaroos and koala bears.” She thinks it’s funny because I never saw any kangaroos or koalas when I lived there, and she is quite sure that they were all over the place and I must have been very silly to have missed seeing them.
“Tell Me About Me”
Other times, Bean asks me to tell her stories about when she was a little girl. (As opposed to the very big girl who now sits in a booster seat and doesn’t need a step stool to reach the bathroom sink.)
So I tell her about the day she was born and I visited her in the hospital. And about the first time I took her for a walk in her stroller, all the way to the beach and back and she never cried once. And the first time she smiled at me. And the day she first called me “Ganma.”
She enjoys telling me stories too, of times more recent, that she can remember.
“Remember the time we were at the Monteberry Aquarium and I wanted to jump in with the fish?” Well, no, I didn’t remember that. Maybe she forgot to tell me, or maybe I just forgot. But that’s ok. She’s learning that sometimes our memories of shared events aren’t exactly the same.
“Tell Me About YOUR Mommy and Daddy”
Bean loves to hear stories about when I was a baby in England, and often I talk about my mother and father. Because I have pictures of both of them in my house, she kind of knows who they are, and because both my parents were wonderful story tellers, I have lots of stories to tell her about when they were little.
“Once upon a time,” I’ll start, “when my daddy was only ten years old . . .”
And I’ll tell her how he walked to the farm where the milkman’s horse was boarded, and hooked it up to the milk float, then put the empty milk cans on and drove it to the milkman’s house before going to school.
Or how he used to work in a factory where they made woolen cloth and he had to run along the tops of the looms replacing empty bobbins.
She knows my parents’ families were poor, and that they walked or rode their bicycles everywhere because they didn’t have a car. She knows, also, that they came to this country and worked very hard and bought a car and a house and furniture and birds in an aviary and a cat and a dog. And that one summer he and my mom drove to Yosemite and Mom took this picture.
How Much Do You Know About Your Family?
In 2001, two psychologists, Marshall Duke and Robyn Fivush, studied the effects of knowing family history on children’s ability to cope with stressful events. They developed 20 questions about the family, and asked children in 48 families if they knew the answers. Examples of the questions are “Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school?” and “Do you know the story of your birth?”
They then compared the children’s results with the results of psychological tests the children had taken, and reached a remarkable conclusion. Brue Feiler, writing about Duke and Fivush’s research in the New York Times in 2013, reported that “The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. The ‘Do You Know’ scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness.”
My Father’s Legacy
I’m sure he had no idea that he was helping me cope with life’s ups and downs by telling me stories, but my father gave me a rich vision of life in the north of England in the 1930s and 1940s. When I was five until I was too big to do so, he would tell me stories of a “little boy in England” every evening while I stood behind him on the sofa and combed his thick, wavy hair.
I’ve written about my dad before, here. But I mention him tonight because he started this storytelling tradition in our family, and because he is very much on my mind tonight. He passed away on November 9, 2011, but his stories still live on in my memory. He would have been 96 this coming Wednesday. Happy birthday, dad! Thanks for all the the stories.
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