Friday, June 26, 2009

Storytime

About two weeks back, I wrote an entry about my son's latest foray into the wide world of telling jokes. Just when I thought things couldn't get any worse, it turns out that he's developed a new interest. I now proudly present My Son the Storyteller!

A while ago, our son had begun asking for (and then demanding) original stories made up on the spot. Despite any pretense I might have of one day being a fiction writer, making up stories out of whole cloth and without warning is simply not something I make any claim to being good at. My wife, however, while not really any better at it is always willing to give it a shot.

Up until recently, we've always had a number of cats sharing our home and they had all been rescued from either the street or from a shelter. This provided my wife with a fairly wide array of arguably interesting material from which to attempt to make up stories. Our son absolutely loves them, although I have no clue why, and is currently demanding that we tell him as many of these stories at bedtime as he thinks we'll put up with. At the risk of insulting my wife, these "cat stories" are without exception completely inane and insipid but they do keep our son happy. (I also readily admit that no matter how bad they might be, they are still better than the ones that I come up with).

Yesterday, however, I had a new treat. LR decided that it was time for him to begin telling his own "cat stories." As I explained with his joke telling: "I applaud his creativity. I do. But I also have to sit through them." I now present, for the first time anywhere, the story-stylings of my son. [Note: one of the cats we had was named Mishuganah (pronounced mi-SHUG-ana), which means "crazy" in Yiddish].

1) "Once upon a time, there was a cat. And there was also a crazy cat named Mishuganah. The End."

2) "Once upon a time, there was a cat. And there was another cat. And there was another cat. And there was another thing that was also a cat. And they lived happily ever after. The End."

It's going to be an even longer year than I thought.

1 comment:

  1. *laughs* Reminds me of when my mom tried to get my brother and I to tell her stories! She would give us first sentences, or a premise, and we were supposed to tell her a story around them. She has them written down somewhere, I think. I was probably five or six at the time, so my stories were a bit more elaborate than his at three or four. As I recall, his stories usually consisted of the first sentence, maybe another sentence, and the conclusion "So I ran to Daddy's house." My dad was away at college at the time.

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