What's a Story Worth?

Every Monday morning, before I’ve even donned my walking shoes, I check my email and find a question for me to answer. It’s a gift my son gave me for Christmas, and he week he asked a question through a website called Storyworth that I'm to answer about my childhood and other things.. When I’ve answered all the questions, my children get a keepsake book.

Now I’m guessing, that since I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018 and had recently completed more than a year-and-a-half of chemo/radiation/targeted therapy, that he thought I might die with stories in my head that were still left to be told. It was touching beyond measure, as my kids, historically, have rolled their eyes at my stories. I wondered at the time if he really wanted to know these answers, but I took the gift into my heart as it was intended and starting writing.

The answers, I was told, could be short — a paragraph, really — and when I read that, I thought, well, if it’s a story there must be more to it than a single paragraph. (And I thought, too, that the creators of this website didn’t know me at all! But on that first Monday after Christmas, I got my first question and began to ponder. “What is one of your favorite children’s stories.” A lot. Just one story? How could I narrow a childhood of reading into just one story? But as I perused my mind and my library, I kept coming back to the Illustrated Treasure of Children’s Literature.

Here is what I wrote ( it’s not ONE story, but several):

When I was a child and before I was in school, our library at home was quite limited, as was the town library, which was in a room above the Fire Department (if you can imagine that.) I can still remember walking up the creaky stairs to the library room, watching the dust filter through the windows. Out the window to my left was Pop B’s office, and in front, the Post Office. But you didn’t want to be up there when the fire alarm blared! I remember those details but not particular books I checked out. In the school library, I remember a book called “Little White Dove,” which was the imagined story of what had happened to Virginia Dare. Her life fascinated me as a young girl — does still — and I liked the book a lot. 

But I suppose some favorites came much earlier, from a book I have on my bookshelf today called “Better Homes & Gardens Story Book.”

I’m sure B must have gotten this as part of her subscription to Better Homes & Gardens magazine. Somehow it ended up as mine, which was rare for this third child! I remember this was my first exposure to Beatrix Potter’s “Tale of Peter Rabbit,” and grumpy old Mr. McGregor. It was filled with poetry, something I loved as a child, and one of my favorites was called The Goops. “The Goops they lick their fingers and the Goops they lick their knives; They spill their broth no the tablecloth. Oh, they lead disgusting lives! The Goops they talk while eating, and loud and fast they chew; And that is why I’m glad that I am not a Goop — are you?

That would make me giggle, because we were all Goops as children of course! I used to read that one to you.

The stories of Uncle Remus drew me, too, but though they are based on old slave tales, they where written by a white man writing in dialect. ( At Carolina I wrote a paper on “Jack Tales,” and interviewed my boyfriend’s maid, who learned the stories about Uncle Remus from her grandmother, who had likely been a slave. I recorded her and I think that recording ended up in the Southern Collection at the Wilson Library at UNC.) The stories carry universal messages, the language is not appropriate for today’s child.

I loved the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson. He wrote one called The Swing, which I loved to do in my grandparents back yard, and The Land of Counterpane, which was about a boy who was stuck in bed because he was sick and learned to create a whole story with the toys he played with on his bedcovers. And my favorite is probably My Shadow, which is can recite by heart. “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me. And what can be the use of him ( I would say ‘her’) is more than I can see….”

 But the question asks for just one story. (You know I don’t follow the rules!)

The one that keeps coming back to me is from another anthology that I read all the time as a child called The Illustrated Treasury of Children’s Literature. Again, we didn’t have a lot of books in the library, but at home we had this book. You may remember it, because I read from it when you were younger, before we started reading books together like Old Yeller and Harry Potter. 

It’s a fairy tale from Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote all the great fairy tales, many of which are dark. The Emperor’s New Clothes (so much like today’s Trump), Little Mermaid, Princess & the Pea, The Ugly Duckling. He also wrote The Little Match Girl. It has never been made into a Disney movie for reasons that will become apparent. 

It’s the story of a child of poverty who has to sell matches on the street to make any sort of living at all. And on New Year’s Eve, when no one has bought any of her matches, she is cold and hungry and searching for warmth. 

As I child, I could not imagine this life, no more than I could imagine being a princess, but this one drew me more for some reason. I did know children who I never thought of as poor, but who wore the same clothes to school every day and never had new shoes. They would grow out of their clothes but never had clothes that fit. I never asked my parents why this was so.
In the Little Match Girl story, cold and hungry, she walks through the streets and watches the windows of the houses she passes. There, she sees people celebrating the New Year with goose, bright fires in fireplaces, family all around. But as she walks, she grows even colder and sits in a corner shielded from the wind and starts striking matches for warmth.

And with every match she strikes a new image of warmth embraces her. She imagines sitting in front of a warm stove until the match fades out. She strikes another: a table set with pretty china and her own roast goose; another brings a Christmas tree, filled with candles (no electricity when it was written); and then her grandmother, who was the only person who had ever been kind to her. And in trying to keep that image alive, she strikes all the matches she has in her possession until she had no more. 

The story says her grandmother had never looked more beautiful as she lifted the child up and took her through the stars at the end.

I think it was lost on me that she died in the end! But it’s the story of the warmth memories bring that drew me to her, I think.

So it seems an appropriate story to start this thing off. 

I guess, through The Little Match Girl, I learned early in my life that stories can be beautiful and sad and uplifting, all at the same time. And that is so true with life, right? You both have been through joy and beauty and great sadness all at once, as have I, many many times. As your mother, I wish I could shield you from the sadness, but my job is not to shield you but to offer comfort, when the challenge comes. I hope I have done that, at least to this point. And not caused you too much pain as you try to sort it all out.

This is an amazing gift. In the writing, I’ve learned a good bit about myself just now. I look forward to the next question. (I didn’t peek, though they said I could.) 

Every week since, then (well, ok, I skipped a couple of weeks) I’ve written stories about my grandparents, what my mother was like as a young woman, how I go to school, the friends I’ve had since before kindergarten. Stories about travels I’ve taken, organizations I’ve belonged to — it turns out the Tar Heel Girls State, class of 1974, was a very progressive group — my first job and given awkward advice about relationships. I’ve written about inventions that have most changed my daily life (the smart phone was first, chemotherapy advances, second.), and shared the fact that my preferred way to travel is by country road. And the question of where I went on vacation as a child? My response to my children was: I wrote a book about that! But as it turns out, the book was about how other families spent their vacations, so there is a whole ‘nother story about our own.

I have always felt I knew the worth of a story, and I’ve told many. But it turns out, the worth of stories prompted by my children are turning into the most worthy of all to me. In these months since Christmas, I’ve mined my own history like no time before, sorting through scrapbooks and scripts of plays I was in, Playbills I’ve kept (I had no idea I’d actually seen Michael Crawford live in a production in London in 1975, though I remember the runway in The Rocky Horror Picture Show too vividly.) I’ve read letters and political platforms that supported rape crisis centers and mental health programs in every county, and statewide recycling. —from that Girl’s State trip —when nobody in eastern N.C. had heard a thing about recycling.

As I said in that first entry: Stories can be beautiful and sad and uplifting, sometimes all at once. Stories can be simple and complex at once, too. And funny and heartbreaking. All of that, all at the same time. And that’s remarkable, when you think about it.

Lately, I’ve been listening to a podcast hosted by author Kelly Corrigan, much of it about the power of story: why we tell them and why we need them. In her conversations with authors from around the country, the same theme keeps coming through: Stories show us the truth of our lives in ways living through them doesn’t necessarily reveal. And it’s in the retelling of our own stories that discover things about ourselves that we didn’t really know in the moment.

So get out that and tell your story, folks. Your family will thank you. And it’s so worth it.