Family Storytelling: Part III
The final part of my family's stories...

Mom and Dad college stories: Although my parents grew up relatively near each other in New Jersey, they didn’t meet until attending junior college together. As they attended college in the 1970s, first in New Jersey, then in Florida, they came out of the experience with a number of colorful stories. I didn’t know certain details of them until recently (ahem, hem), but that was only icing on the cake.

Originally, my parents were strictly friends. Best friends, in fact. Mom was still good friends with Maureen, but Mom and Dad had a comfortableness around each other unlike anyone else. This was especially odd because my Dad was extremely shy at the time. Now, some of my friends joke that they’ve never heard him speak, but that could have been a legitimate statement at that time. He hardly said anything, and never ever spoke to girls. Except my Mom. Not surprisingly, he was completely in love with her. But like all sitcom-ish situations, my Mom was clueless. Completely and utterly clueless, not that fake clueless that you pretend to get out of awkward situations. He was just her best friend. Besides, as she would tell you, she was dating this guy at the time quite seriously. They were even engaged. So, like any good friend-who-is-a-boy, my father listened to her whenever she bitched about her fiancée. And from the sound of it, he wasn’t exactly a peach. Nan and Pop seriously disliked her fiancée, and repeatedly suggested that she date Dad instead. Finally, Mom wised up. She said she could imagine being like Lisa in that episode where she imagines marrying Ralph – “Kids, I’m watching mah stories!” She broke up with her fiancée just before the wedding. Although my grandparents lost some money, I think they were quite relieved. Then, she finished junior college and decided that, “Hey, Richard and his friends are at University of Florida, it looks nice, why don’t I go to college there?” So she did. Without ever stepping foot on campus before her first class. But it didn’t matter because Dad was there along with his friends, it had a good program, and that’s all she needed. Eventually, at some point in Florida, Dad got drunk one night. This in and of itself wasn’t that unusual – they did live near the Anhaeiser-Busch plant. But this night, Dad kissed Mom for the first time. And she realized that her best friend had been more than her best friend all along, and the rest is history.

Besides their get-together story, Mom and Dad had loads of other college stories. My parents went to college in Tampa, FL and lived in an apartment with a balcony that looked out over a courtyard. One fall, they were celebrating my dad’s birthday with some friends out on the balcony. As they sang happy birthday to him, they heard another group on a different balcony across the courtyard join in harmony. It turned out to be the Outlaws! The Outlaws were a semi-successful 1970s group that formed in Tampa. They ended up having two songs that still occasionally get played on the radio – “There Goes Another Love Song,” and “Green Grass and High Tides.” So although they weren’t superstars, my dad still remembers the occasion fondly.

In addition, my parents had some very colorful characters as friends. For example, one of their best friends, Billy, lived on the apartment complex’s lawn on a lawnchair for about a year. Thankfully, it was Florida, so this wasn’t the worst thing ever. But it wasn’t until I was older that I realized that Billy had been more than just odd as a student/young adult. Similarly, they had a friend who would take on any challenge to eat anything. This happened to include, on one occasion, dog food. On a different occasion when camping, they stripped this guy naked and threw him out of the tent! As my Dad hardly ever said anything, I doubt this was his idea, thankfully.

Camping trips never seemed uneventful with my father’s friends. One time they went canoing, and – somehow - they went over a waterfall! How do you not notice a waterfall? They were probably drunk at the time.

As earlier suggested, drinking was a big part of my parents’ college lives. My dad’s friends had one favorite drinking game that they created themselves. It was called “Teeth.” It involved throwing a beer cap at each other. When you threw it at someone, if you didn’t say anything, they had to catch it. However, if you said, “Teeth!” they had to bounce it off of their teeth. If they didn’t do the right task, or dropped the cap, they had to take a drink. As they continued drinking, hilarity ensued. Although previous to her college career, Mom also talked about how her and her friend Maureen would sneak across the border into New York so they could drink. At the time, the drinking age in NJ was 21, but only 18 in NY. They would hang out at skeezy bars down at the docks. That never sounded appealing to me, quite honestly.

In the case of the story about my parents getting together, it really served to reinforce the idea that my parents were meant to be together. Not that they just fell into each other’s arms, but that their relationship was based on a conscious choice. They made decisions to be together and worked on it. It also taught me and later reinforced how essential friendship is to a romantic relationship. My parents were best friends first in their relationship. It wasn’t based on a knight-in-shining-armor love, but on a cultivated mutual respect and affection. I think this is really one of the main reasons they’ve always had such a strong relationship and why I put such an emphasis on it from the beginning of my relationship with Chris. And of course, Dad winning out over jerky-bad-boy-fiancé showed that nice guys (truly nice but shy, not “Nice Guys”) can get the girl, and will be way better boyfriends and husbands than the alternative.

However, many of these stories served the purpose of entertainment mixed with warnings. As in, “We were jerkasses, do something better with your time in college than we did.” Although I think this applied most strongly to incidents like the canoeing mishap, it was a general theme of many of my parents’ college stories. They acknowledged to me that they drank a lot, and that they had exposure to that atmosphere. They even admitted having fun doing it. But they also weighed that with the idea that they didn’t approve of me doing it, and that really, there were better things that one could do with one’s time. Mom has said many a time that she wished she took more advantage of the many opportunities available at college. And honestly, from my freshman and sophomore years in college, I can verify that there are many things more fun than hanging out with obnoxious people when they are drunk. (Unobnoxious people can be another story.) In some ways, I think that even without the “afterschool message,” my parents’ telling these stories actually made drinking less attractive to me. It wasn’t mysterious or fascinating to me. It was something they did and were willing to talk about it, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. And quite honestly, who wants to be more like their parents on something like that?

Mom’s school stories: My mom, for those who don’t know her, is an elementary school teacher. From as early as I can remember, she has told me stories of her experiences in schools.

Some of her earliest school stories were about her teaching in Florida, in some very rural school districts. One day, while she was attempting to teach language skills via animal identification, she held up a picture of an opossum. One kid said, “We had that for dinner last night!” Mom was rather surprised, to say the least.

After moving back up to the north, Mom took a position at a facility for children who were very mentally disturbed. She worked there because many of them were also mentally retarded and required serious language help. The story of one child in particular always stuck with me. He was the child of circus people, who locked him in a cage for hours and days on end with the animals. As he was only a child while he was in the school facility, he must have been very young when this happened. As a result of this abuse, he behaved like an animal, one who never had positive contact with people. He didn’t communicate, was violent, and didn’t know how to express emotion. He was – and my mom never uses this term lightly – unsavable. He was just pushed too far over the edge from a very young age. He was incapable of showing – much less understanding – love. Although he probably had the worst history, there were other children who had also been horrifically abused. There were also some that the teachers knew it wasn’t a question of if, but when, they would be going to jail.

Thankfully, working at this school wasn’t all gloom and doom. In fact, because the students were so out-of-the-mainstream, Mom and her friend Karen had a lot of flexibility. Young and idealistic as they were, the two of them thought it was a good idea to bring their class on field trips. They brought them to the many, many places these kids never had an opportunity to go to before. They even brought them on short hikes! When they passed by the cliffs near Thatcher Park, one kid pointed out the window and asked, “Who made those?” He had never seen anything so big or dramatic that wasn’t man-made.

After she became pregnant with me, Mom switched jobs, and eventually ended up in her current job at her current school district. Although it is a normal school district, it’s also a public school in an urban area. So she faced some of the same problems she faced at her previous jobs. This time it was different though, because I was around. And I was always welcome at her school. I spent many days in her classroom, part of her groups at first, and then growing to help and guide the children. Eventually I graduated to teaching them myself, as a substitute aide and teacher.

All along the way, I heard stories of her children, who were never biological, never my brothers and sisters, but her children nonetheless. She told me about the broken families, where the children lived with their mother and her rotating line-up of boyfriends. She told me about families where the parents, whether single or not, worked terribly hard and yet still had difficulty providing the necessities for their children. She told me about the foster children, bounced from home to home, never quite knowing where they would end up. She told me about the children whose only meals for the day were at school, because breakfast and lunch were free. The children who dreaded summer break because they didn’t have anywhere to go during the day, anything to eat in the house.

As it turns out, somewhere along the line, Mom realized that she most loved the most difficult children. Probably because she knew they needed the most love. She loves her students as her children to the point of almost making it real at times – she seriously considered adopting one of the foster children she taught. (It fell through for a number of reasons.)

Hearing my Mom’s school stories always reinforced how extremely lucky and blessed I am in life. I often heard these stories at dinnertime, while I was eating in my house, with my two parents on either side of me. The contrast between my situation and theirs was clearly evident, even from a young age. Not only was my family economically stable/well-off, but also emotionally nurturing and supportive. My parents always emphasized both sides of that coin. Also, these stories raised the awareness in me that not everyone was as well off as I was. Unlike some other kids in our comfortable suburb, I had a strong awareness that most of the world was not like this. I knew that even though I lived comfortably, less than 20 miles away were people living in desperate situations. Perhaps most importantly, I knew that children, who did nothing to cause their poverty, were living in these situations.

Besides just knowing about the existence of poverty, Mom’s school stories instilled in me the value and need to help others who were less fortunate. I think she felt this responsibility partly because of her recognition that others, including family and friends, had supported her family when they were poor. But this responsibility was more than just a payback, it was a task to be embraced and enjoyed. She always framed it as a commitment, a welcomed duty, not a burden. Her passion and belief in her job always shined through in these stories, even on the toughest days when she looks forward to retirement.

My passion for social justice derives from a combination of these stories and my time spent at Mom’s school. Because I knew that no matter what these children’s parents did or did not do, the kids did not deserve to live in poverty. They did not deserve to live that life. As adults, with the potential to have influence, we had to take care of them in whatever ways we could. For my mom, it was teaching. For me, it is advocacy and campaigning – changing the systems themselves.




So those are my family’s stories. There are many others, of course. There’s loads of stories my mom tells about me as a child, from my babysitter dressing me up as a clown when I was asleep, to me managing to put anything in my mouth that I could imagine was food. There’s ones about my aunts and uncles that didn’t directly involve my parents, like Aunt Patty breaking both her arms one summer and meeting Bruce Springsteen at a party another summer. Most recently, there’s Shea stories, involving Chris’s parents and extended family. But I chose these because they are the ones that have affected me the most, shaped my view of the world.

Eventually, Chris and I will have our own family stories. We have some of our own stories now, that we tell our family and friends. But I feel that these stories don’t quite solidify as truly “family stories” until we pass them on to our own children. Although not for some years, I do foresee a time when we will be able to pass them on. When that time comes, I hope that when we do tell our children our family stories, that they are just as vivid and insightful as when our families shared their stories with us.