Bedtime Stories

Lisa Bigelow

My mother read aloud to me for so many years that other adults looked at her askance when she acknowledged the habit. I received bedtime stories until I left home for college. We didn’t read every night, and the reading material grew more complex over time, and sometimes it was I who read, when my mother’s head or voice ached, but this ritual remained vital to us all that time.

The older I got, the more interested I became in hearing stories of my own family. Our family is scattered, with most of my grandparents dead, so most everything I know is through my parents, about their own lives, though I have picked up some details about other people in my family that I never knew for myself: my father’s father was “irascible” and his mother would have been a good in-law; my mother’s grandfather brought her bags of cherries as a special treat.

All the stories can be told in just a few words. The day my mother was born, my great-grandmother said, “the ladies wore sleeveless dresses on Chestnut Street.” (It was March, in Philadelphia.) My father’s scout trip was rained out, and 80 boys and their leaders packed into the local hamburger joint and gave it more business in an hour than they’d had all week.

I harbor the hope that if I ever have children they will someday want to hear stories from my life, stories of the sort that spill out only in late night discussions with a soul mate. I love to tell stories about myself, perhaps to a fault; it seems a bit vain. I suppose that’s why I’m a writer. Whether I seek to put the truth on paper or to weave a fiction, it is my own soul that I trickle onto the page with every word, over and over again.