Why Families Tell Stories

As winds and rain slam this place, the boys and I went over and back across the Bay Bridge tonight, trying to move an ancient bed from my house to the house where any day now, my first granddaughter will arrive to start her own special time on this planet of ours.

The boys have been sick, and standing out in such miserable weather was not good for them, but they never uttered a word of complaint.

We're family.

I am blessed to be the patriarch of an exceptional line of young men and women, who with their partners, children, and friends represent the best our society has to offer our common future.

For this, I can claim no credit whatsoever. All of my kids have transcended any accomplishments of mine and show the promise of contributing to our common good in ways far beyond anything I have done.

But this is as it should be. Each generation must improve upon the record of the last; particularly now, with the specter of global climate change upon us, as we will need our best minds to contribute if we are to find the ways to survive as a species, and to continue to tell our stories going forward.

Meanwhile on this night, in the heavy rain and the bitter wind, two teenage boys tried to help make an old bed fit into a doorway in El Cerrito, but failed. The laws of physics prevailed, as they always do. But tonight, a new family memory was also born. Some day many years from now these boys will laugh about it with their brother-in-law and their big sister, and perhaps also with their nieces and nephews, who will be enthralled at its telling.

I was there tonight too but I will be gone by the time this story gets retold. What gives me pleasure is knowing how this story will go on, plus the certainty that I will be laughing along with them, way out there in my version of heaven, an atheist's heaven to be sure, but a story-teller's heaven as well.