Inspired By

My father told my sister and I a story when we were little. The story was about how he used to tell stories to children that he babysat when he was 14 years old. He told these stories to children who were just a few years younger than him. The stories were about two groups, or clans, that were in conflict with each other. One clan was good, and the other clan was evil. The year was 1946 and I have since speculated that these stories may have been inspired by the recent events of World War II. I will probably never know because no matter how much we pressed our father, he couldn’t remember any details of the stories he told his young charges.

He remembered being desperately poor though, and that the meagre income he earned babysitting was very important to him. Thus he recalled very acutely the kind of stories he told and his purpose. He wanted to tell stories that ended with cliff hangers so that the children would want to hear more. The hope was that the children would beg their parent’s to ask for him to come back. His goal was job security. As he tells it, the children loved his stories and he kept the babysitting job.

Because he made the stories up on the spot and catered to the ever changing whims of the children, he quickly forgot the content of the stories he told. Nothing was ever written down. All that he remembered were the names of two warring clans: the Poodgelloms and the Pikkalis. That’s all we ever needed from our father to begin to tell our own stories.