The Importance of Modern Day Raconteurs

Author

cooter doodle
November 09, 2024

The Importance of Modern Day Raconteurs

Ever since our little girl was able to string words together, my husband and I have joked about the colloquialisms she’s brought into our home. Where most children might ask questions of “whats” and “whens”, our daughter has instead clung to her favorite 5-word mantra:

“Tell me all about it.”

Sure, it seems simple enough. But as a parent, it has been quite disarming to sit behind the wheel of a car, driving between birthday parties, car rider lines, grocery stores, and soccer practices to suddenly hear, “Mommy, tell me all about gravity.”

By definition, such a grand request makes almost any response insufficient.

There’s no simple way to tell about the everythings of anything.

But I bought in. Day after day, I’ve accepted her invitations of inquiry. And as any patient parent would, I’ve tried my best to “tell her all about” whatever “it” might be.

I’ve turned what could have been quick, appeasing answers into well-crafted soliloquies on lightning and sweat and friendship and scabs and the benefits of making mistakes.

Our ritual is simple: “Tell me all about it, mom.” And I do.

It was a fun exercise at first, attempting to explain the intricacies of a messy, complicated world in ways that a child might understand. Her questions mostly aimed to satisfy her curiosities.

But as she’s gotten older, her requests have turned towards alleviating fears. After a summer filled with doctors appointments and new medications, car rides filled with “tell me all about seizures” have proven less effortless than our talks of the past.

There’s no simple way to tell about the everythings of anything.

But throughout the evolutions of her requests, I’ve recently come to realize that it never really was about giving a right answer. I was never going to be graded. I never had to be at the top of my game. Because it never really was about objective truths.

It was always about telling a story.

I hadn’t realized it at first. But all this time, she’d been asking me to invite her into my world. And in turn, she’s been inviting me into hers, to make sense of these experiences that we share.

It’s why a simple “tell me all about bees” transforms seamlessly into stories of times when I was stung as a kid. The stories have always been a part of it.

She wanted to hear all about everything, but with all the parts of me mixed in.

/

Yesterday, I was reminded that it was my dad’s birthday.

I found myself not so much missing him as I was craving the birthday dinners where he would tell us about the dumb things he and his friends used to do as kids. That’s when I realized that for the first time since he’s passed away, there’s no longer anyone left to tell me all about him.

Given enough time, we all come to lose our storytellers eventually.

And it’s the stories that I miss.

Stories in Leaving

“Leaving and Waving” is worth your time. I promise.

Here’s Deanna Dikeman’s story:

For 27 years, I took photographs as I waved good-bye and drove away from visiting my parents at their home in Sioux City, Iowa. I started in 1991 with a quick snapshot, and I continued taking photographs with each departure.

I never set out to make this series. I just took these photographs as a way to deal with the sadness of leaving.

It gradually turned into our good-bye ritual. And it seemed natural to keep the camera busy, because I had been taking pictures every day while I was there. These photographs are part of a larger body of work I call Relative Moments, which has chronicled the lives of my parents and other relatives since 1986.

When I discovered the series of accumulated “leaving and waving” photographs, I found a story about family, aging, and the sorrow of saying good-bye.

In 2009, there is a photograph where my father is no longer there. He passed away a few days after his 91st birthday. My mother continued to wave good-bye to me. Her face became more forlorn with my departures.

In 2017, my mother had to move to assisted living. For a few months, I photographed the good-byes from her apartment door. In October of 2017 she passed away. When I left after her funeral, I took one more photograph, of the empty driveway. For the first time in my life, no one was waving back at me.

Thank you for giving me this space to tell my stories. Thank you for listening.

until next time. -cd