Story of my life
A couple of months ago, McIrish and I took our grandchildren on a ninety-minute car ride. The Butterfly was in a stage called I hate this bloody car seat, so we had to distract her. The Peeper was agonizingly bored and agitated by his sister’s fussing. “She wants to listen to Moana,” he said, but McIrish and I, being troglodytes, lacked the ability to make that happen.
And so I made the mistake of singing Wheels on the Bus. The Peeper liked hearing about the parts of the bus; the Butterfly loved the people. I did every imaginable verse—the wheels, the windshield wipers, the blinker, the engine, the spark plugs, the muffler, the doors, the driver, the children, the babies, the parents, the dogs, the cats.
This led to Old MacDonald. Another mistake. “Mo!” cried the Butterfly after McIrish and I mooed through the first verse. “Mo! Mo!” She sounded like an adorable Billy Idol. We went through every conceivable animal, including worms, giraffes and hippos (no clue what sound they make, but the kids bought it). There was a lot of traffic. We were desperate. “Mo!” demanded the Butterfly. “Please stop,” said the Peeper.
Thank God. “Tell me a story about a baby brontosaurus in an egg,” the Peeper demanded. Like my own children, my grands are lucky—I tell stories for a living. There is no subject I can’t fictionalize. “Once upon a time, I was a baby brontosaurus still in my egg,” I said. “I could see a pinkish light,” said I. “My shell seemed to be getting smaller, but in fact, it was because I was growing.”
I hatched, saw my parents and siblings, went for a ride on Daddy Brontosaurus’s back. We saw Megalodon in the river, fled Megalodon, got back to the nest, ate some leaves our parents pre-chewed for us and went to bed. “What happens next?” the Peeper asked. “What about the next day?”
“The next day, we went for a walk. There, just at the water’s edge, we saw a terrifying ankylosaurus,” I said, grabbing the name from the ether.
“Those are plant eaters,” he said. He knows way more than I do about dinosaurs. He’s four and a half, after all. A veritable encyclopedia. “The brontosauruses wouldn’t be afraid.”
“But we were not afraid,” I amended.
If it were up to the Peeper, I would tell a day-by-day account of the creature’s entire life. Other stories have been about all of us shrinking to an inch and fleeing their cat. There’s a Christmas story about kids seeing Santa. Mickey the Fire Engine, originally told by Sainted Mother when I was small. If we were all birds and could fly.
My own kids enjoyed stories of themselves as wicked children who had to live in a cage. Dinkadackadore, a nefarious character invented by Dearest Son, was a criminal who regularly escaped jail but was always caught by the children’s mother. There were ongoing tales about a princess who rode a horse, had a guard-wolf and carried her baby brother in front of her as she galloped throughout the kingdom. Siblings who rescued an enslaved unicorn.
I love telling the little ones stories, love that they listen so intently and laugh in the right places. Beats the soundtrack from Moana any day.
