My dad used to tell the best stories around our yellow kitchen table. We would’ve just finished supper, but we weren’t quite ready to get up and start cleaning up the kitchen and that’s when Dad would start with his story telling. He told us stories about the time when the billy goats that they kept on their farm chased him and his little brother down their long dirt driveway, Dad half expecting one of them to buck him in his backside and he’d go sailing through the air like in the comic strips. Another story he told was about Shadytown, a rock city that he and his siblings built out of rocks along their creek. We would beg Mom to tell us stories about her growing up, but she was a bit embarrassed because most of her stories involved her getting into trouble and she didn’t care for us to know about that side of her.
But Dad’s stories would send me off imagining what it would’ve been like growing up on a farm in the middle of the Arkansas Ozarks, what it would’ve been like not to have indoor plumbing or electricity, about having to have a fire going at all times for cooking and for warmth during the cold winter. But most of Dad’s stories didn’t dwell on the hard times that he grew up in, instead they were about the things that made him chuckle, that amazed him, that made him the man that he was. He talked of the beauty of the first bluebirds of the season, about the time Grandpa took him out to the upper pasture in the middle of the night to help Dad’s cow, Snowflake, give birth and the arrival of that tiny calf. He talked about the grass tennis court that Grandpa built in front of their wooden house so Grandma and Grandpa could play tennis (can you imagine coming across a tennis court in the rural backcountry of Arkansas?).
One story that has been floating around in my head these last couple days is the time that Dad had gotten up from our kitchen table to fix himself a little desert. He took out a couple slices of bread, spread them with peanut butter and then proceeded to pour pancake syrup all over the bread. My brother and sister and I all looked at each other, then listened as he told the story behind the concoction. When Dad was growing up, Grandpa would do the same thing, except with sorghum or molasses on those days that Grandma didn’t feel like baking a desert. We begged Dad to make us each a slice of bread with peanut butter smeared all over with pancake syrup dripping down, and after glancing over at Mom, made us each a small plate.
I had never tased anything so good in all my life. I can still see Dad standing in the kitchen, his back turned to us as he spread peanut butter on the bread slices, his head cocked to one side as he told us the story, his gentle voice rolling over us and around us and keeping us warm in that small Kansas kitchen in the 1970’s.