I’m a story teller. A teller of tales, a weaver of webs and a spinner of yarns. It’s what I love to do and I’ve done since I was a boy. As many friends will tell you, I often repeat the same stories over and over but I still tell them with glee. I learned to tell stories from my Dad who would tell me stories passed down to him from his father, my grandfather, who was the ultimate spinner of tales. It’s in the blood. He would tell stories of the Mexican Revolution and some of the outlandish things he witnessed. Perhaps that’s why I wandered so much in my youth, as I was looking for adventures to tell of. And I did and I have.

Stories have been essential to the proliferation of cultures and the evolution of man. Stories about Gilgamesh beget stories of Western ideology and concepts. Verbal histories were a way to create volumes of histories of tribes and their cultures and these histories were passed down from generation to generation. Eventually the art of the verbal history became a written history and the documentation of who we are and who we’ve been. But not just the history but the art of fiction was told in these tales. From tall tales to the written word, stories have been a landmark to our past and a beacon to our future.

Verbal story telling has been my joy. There is nothing better than the build up of the world of a tale and close it with a thundering finish of a punchline. The story is the key and if poetic license and a stretching of the boundaries of truth is needed, then so be it. And though I love a good verbal story, writing and being a writer is all I’ve ever really wanted to do. It has been my dream to create worlds from the depths of my imagination and share those worlds with other people.

Recently, I was going through a pallet of my hand written notebooks (of which there are hundreds) I’ve used for the past thirty years. Deep in the archives of my work, I discovered the first ‘novel’ I actually finished. I wrote it my senior year of high school and it is, in fact, pretty terrible. But in the pages and words that I wrote, I could see the etymology of the words and the stories I write today. The ‘novel’ was titled, Letters to Holden, a sophomoric tale of an immature young man writing a letter to the literary character, Holden Caulfield.

It was fun to go back and read something I wrote thirty years ago. To see the boy I was and, in many ways, still am. Some of my diction is the same and some of the syncopation I write in hasn’t changed. But, it’s also good to see how I’ve matured as a writer. Also as a person, as the trials and tribulations that character (me) struggled through seems so ridiculous to me now. But, as I continue to pursue my career as an author, I hope I maintain some of the raw innocence that I saw in Letters to Holden. After all, it’s a story and I am still a story teller.

So tell your friends the stories of your lost weekend, your first love, the night you cannot remember and the one that got away. Pass along the tales of past adventures and shots of whiskey downed and events you’ve conquered. The verbal story is the passing down of who we are, who we’ve been and who we hope to become. Don’t keep that away from the world and the ones you love. That’s the good stuff.

Apologies for a brief sabbatical from the blog. I will be writing a blog every Monday and will be sending some of the pictures and recipes from my FavChef contest as well. Until then my friends, take my advice; pull down your pants and slide on the ice.