Storyteller, Part 1
Tools of the Trade
The Storyteller series is an ongoing recollection of my love of tall tales and the many ways I have been blessed (and sometimes cursed) to tell them.
Up until the age of six, I grew up in a doublewide trailer in the blue mountains of West Virginia. My parents worked hard to make sure I never went hungry, but it was a close call on a few occasions.
My first memory of true gratitude was the day I climbed into my mother’s lap with a series of questions about the existence of Santa Claus. It was shortly after Christmas. I was around five years old and as precocious as they come.
“Reindeer don’t fly or have glowing noses, nobody can travel the whole world in one night, and lots of kids don’t even have a chimney! Is he really real?”
My mother made a choice that I think served as proof of how well she knew her son. She told me, “Santa Claus, as in the spirit of giving and showing kindness, is absolutely real. But a literal man in a red suit riding around in a sleigh? No, honey. That’s not real.”
I nodded with a great deal of seriousness. And then I looked at one of the toys I had received for Christmas. It was an X-Men action figure (either Penance or La Lunatica, if memory serves).
That toy was actually what had tipped me off to the duplicitous nature of the Santa story in the first place. I had asked my mother to get that toy for me, but I never once mentioned it to any mall Santa or wrote any letter about it.
Then I started bawling. My mom tried to figure out what was wrong with me, and I could barely manage to get out, “I never said thank you.”
I doubt I fully comprehended the sacrifices that my parents made to give me an enjoyable childhood, but I also wasn’t totally ignorant. My parents weren’t shy about telling me that we couldn’t afford something. It was never in a berating or manipulative way. It was simple fact.
“Mom, Dad, I want that.”
“I understand, honey, but we don’t have the money for it right now.”
And I don’t recall arguing the point very much. I knew my parents loved me, and I knew (at least to some degree) that they didn’t withhold things from me out of anything but necessity and good parenting.
And yet all the gifts I had received underneath the Christmas tree had come from them.
I think that might be why I grew so very attached to my action figures and toys.
For a poor kid in a doublewide trailer in backwoods West Virginia, I had a treasure trove of toys. Xenomorphs and dinosaurs and transformers, oh my. Not all of them (maybe not even half of them) made the move from West Virginia to North Carolina in early 1996.
I remember the night my uncle called my mom to tell us our trailer had been vandalized. All the stuff we had temporarily left behind, now gone or damaged or worse (they apparently did some very unhygienic things in several of the rooms).
As they were discussing the details, I kept thinking about an alligator piñata I had refused to ever break. I tearfully asked about it, and my mother humored me (despite whatever loss she must have been feeling herself) and soberly shook her head when my uncle delivered the news.
I was devastated.
All those toys left behind, now and truly gone.
You see, they were special to me, and still are special to me in memoriam, because they were how I first told stories.
I relived scenes from movies and TV shows. I rewrote the endings so my favorite villains weren’t actually the bad guys. I played out dialogue between Harryhausen-style monsters and my teddy bears.
Those toys, and the many more I would collect after the move to North Carolina, fostered an imagination that has spun tales ever since.
Unfortunately, using toys to tell stories wasn’t my only medium.
I was also an expert liar.
