Making a Short Story Long

8/18/04

MAKING A SHORT STORY LONG

Charley Kempthorne

Look Who's Talking

Mom was a talker. She’d talk about anything and everything. Endlessly. The family joke was that she once took a phone call, a wrong number, but still talked for 20 minutes. Dad would listen to her talk, politely, but when she got too far out to sea he’d say, irritably, “Lil, make a long story short.” This never worked. To her the details and the blow-by-blow were all-important. What was life for, if not to talk? There would be plenty of time for silence down the road.

I learned from my father’s experience. After he died in ’83, for 14 years until she died in 1997, I saw her or talked to her usually in person or sometimes on the phone nearly every day—and I learned to handle her a little better. I figured if she’s going to talk--and she was, you know, that was her job, as she saw it—so if she was going to do it anyway, I might as well get her to talk about something interesting.

Because she was interesting. Oh, she could be dull, recounting scene by scene a movie on TV (“And then James Mason said to Ava Gardner…”), or even, incredibly, a golf game hole by hole. So I’d gently interrupt and ask her a seemingly random offhand question, like, “Didn’t you go to school with John Dillinger?”

She’d stop in mid-sentence, catch her breath and look at me sharply, as if to say: I know what you’re trying to do. But then she’d answer the question.

“No, I didn’t go to school with him. He didn’t go to school. I suppose he went for six or eight grades—somewhere. But he was around. He hung around. We saw him all the time. I knew who he was. He was dating a girl I knew.”

With little further prodding, she’d unravel a story, usually some new thread I hadn’t heard before or a new take on an old one, of her girlhood in tough “Little Chicago,” as they evidently sometimes called Indianapolis back then. Or she’d tell something about her earlier childhood in Kentucky, or some of the later stories after we kids were born, living in Wisconsin or Kansas, where we ended up after Dad got out of the Army in 1946.

When she did that she was fascinating. I was absorbed, and others were too. Sometimes we’d get her going at a family gathering. She’d launch into that Indianapolis or Wisconsin talk, telling about dating Dad and how he and his brothers got into a row with roughnecks at a roadhouse, and some guy got a bloody nose and bled all over Dad’s white linen suit. She’d tell that story, or the one about getting stuck up by some rogue when she was parked and waiting at a train crossing late at night on the way to the hospital to pick up my dad, a doctor. This guy got out of the car behind with a mask on and pulled a revolver. He stuck it under Mom’s nose and took her purse. Mom told about how she only had a dollar and the guy angrily shook her cheeks with his dirty hand and how my brother, a baby sitting beside her, was screaming bloody murder. She told that story so many times and so well, never a dull moment, that I can still hear my brother screaming bloody murder—and I wasn’t even born yet.

Mom was an exceptional storyteller, but how many of us have mothers or fathers or uncles or friends who are exceptional storytellers—when they have a willing listener? And most of us are pretty good listeners when someone’s got something to say. So draw them out a little, get all the details, all the colors. You’ll both enjoy yourselves, and you both might learn something. It’s a two-way street. Life’s like that, isn’t it?

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