I love stories. I especially love family stories and stories from my kids. Do you have a good love story? Yours or your parents? Post it if you’d like. Funny stories from or about kids are welcome, too, as always. It’s our 8th wedding anniversary next week and I’m feeling all sappy. (Yes, Wacky Girl was born two days before our first wedding anniversary. How sweet is that? The girl came out of the womb ready to party.)

“I’ll tell you a story every day when you pick me up,” Wacky Boy promised me last week when I arrived daily to get the kids after theater camp.

Most of my friends in college liked “tall tales,” too. That’s why we worked at the student newspaper. You can make up all kinds of stuff in newspaper work and credit it to someone else. (Kidding! Journalists would never do that!)

“You guys are all good at telling stories,” one of the copy editors told me. He was a little mournful about it. He kept trying to write like Kerouac or Carver and it wasn’t working for him. “I can’t tell stories for shit. And C,” (one of the reporters) “he’ll tell ya stories ’til ya puke.” Yep, that’s what I’ve tried to live up to ever since. I keep trying to get the various family members to write down their stories for me. Stories about my husband, when he was little; stories about my twin aunties, who as little girls lived in North Dakota but played in Canada; stories about love. Oh, love. It’s enough to make ya puke.

I want the story of how my mom and dad met — at Yaw’s Drive-In, “home of the Top-Notch Burger,” she went to Madison High School, he went to Grant, in the other neighborhood, it was a scene — I want it written down in her own words. She keeps promising she’ll write it… someday…

And the story about the time Hockey God was dancing with a hippie chick and… Sorry, I can’t tell you that one. But it is my kids’ favorite story about their dad and gets them laughing their little bootys off. Here’s one from Wacky Girl from a couple of years ago — she was 3 1/2 or 4 at the time. I do this a lot with my kids — they dictate, I type. We print it out, then they color pictures to go with it. I still have the first book my mom and I “wrote” together. “A is for acrobat,” “W is for wooly yak.”

My grandma said she’ll let me videotape her, telling the kids stories. She won’t write them down, but I can.

MY STORY
by Wacky Girl

I love you friend, Brady Bunch, friend, be howdy! Love can’t come true. No, love can come true! We be our matey-howdy! Love me true. Be my shadow. Cow loves you! True!

Love,

WG

Me again — so pretty good, eh? Cuz I wasn’t so sure love could come true, but then I confirmed it with my three-year-old and hell, yes! Love can come true! (Emphasis hers and hers alone.) So I’m thinking she should bag the grade-school career and go straight to writing Hallmark cards. Or spam.

Keep writing.

Yours,

WM