STORIES

We were talking last night at the dinner table, and my daughter Katie said “Dad, you’re a story kind of person.” Which is true. I have a thousand stories about all kinds of things, usually things that happened to me or to friends of mine, and usually funny ones. Anyway, talking about this at dinner led us to talking about my general silliness and acting crazy. Dawn said the kids had no idea how silly and crazy I used to be. I realized how true that was. Why am I so much less like that now? Is it just (God forbid) maturity? Is it a lessening of some sort of intensity that I used to have and that's weakening with age? Did it arise from some need or insecurity that I don’t possess to the same degree any longer? Is my life now less fun and less funny? Maybe, like I read in that book—I think it was Real Boys, by William Pollack—it’s that I was covering depression with humor when I was younger. I’ll have to think about it some more. Perhaps it’s just that I have less ego now than I used to. I no longer feel a need to be the life of every party.
But back to being a “story person.” It occurs to me that one of the elments of that is my strong tendency to anthropomorphize everything. I always see faces and people in random patterns, in marble or stucco or wood grain—anything that has a natural chaotic swirl to it. I also anthropomorphize lots of other things too, especially the animals we’ve had over the years (see my Talking to the Cat poems). When I was small and we sold the trailer we’d been living in for several years, I asked my parents “What if it doesn’t like the people who buy it?”
This is connected to the tendency to round off my experiences into stories. They are both a way of imposing form on chaos, on formlessness. It gives a sense of meaning and completeness to the randomness of life. Everyone has this tendency, but I think for some reason I have it more strongly than a lot of other people.