Tell Me a Story

and keep them alive

Grandma and Grandpa with my baby mom, 1942

I am in Arizona, checking on the cacti. Most of them are fine, but some of them look unhappy on the bottom. Brown. Apparently that can be caused by a lot of things. Overwatering, disease, pests, sunburn, root rot. I am no cactus expert, but I know both cactus and cacti are correct and they are sixty before they grow arms. The big Saguaros I see all around are older than me.

I tell people I am checking on cacti, but I am really in Arizona to see my cousin Rob and his wife Nancy, who are beloved to me. The word supportive is an understatement. They are mentors, cheerleaders, and in some ways a mirror. Before I had any notion that I would ever be forming a blended family, they were modeling it for me. And when I met Mike the parallels were obvious, down to Nancy having four children and Rob having three (Mike had three, I had four). When I had choices to make about whether Mike and I were going to continue to have a relationship, Nancy was one of the few people who was supportive of the idea. That isn’t a thing you forget.

“I know one thing,” Nancy said. “That man loves you.”

He did. He does. And he loved me enough to make the changes that made our relationship and our blended family possible. It is no small thing to be able to see beyond the surface of things. Most people didn’t, and still don’t. Nancy did, and I will love her forever for this, and a thousand other things. The flip side, I suppose, is that I struggle to let go of my anger at people who looked at the surface and made a point of telling me I was making a mistake. Most of them never bothered apologizing for this, which is something else I can’t understand. Wouldn’t you be glad to be wrong about such a thing?

Rob is my cousin on my dad’s side, but my family roots in Arizona are elsewhere. My mom’s parents are from here. My Grandpa is the only grandparent who didn’t go to BYU - he went to university of Arizona. They got married in the Mesa Temple. My Grandma is from Joseph City, which is two hours and 58 minutes northeast of where I am right now. She was famously beautiful, the Superstition Queen in her high school yearbook (I assume that comes from the Superstition Mountains).

My grandma received eight marriage proposals. This comes up one night while my sister and I are in the car with her and she is telling us about some them. “Grandma,” we say. “How many men proposed to you?” She doesn’t know offhand and has to count. It’s eight. She wasn’t quite ready to settle down even when grandpa asked, but he was tired of waiting. She was 29, and grandpa was really handsome. So there you go.

It was probably 1940 or 1941, because my mom was born in 1942. There are cacti here in Mesa that were alive to see it.

I think of another family story, though, because I shut my thumb in the car door, yesterday. Who does that? I don’t think I have since I was a child. But my dad tells a story in his journal about his grandma, my Great-Grandma Blanchard. Someone shuts her fingers in the car door. it is 1950, and my Uncle Brent is a newborn baby. Great Grandma says, “Can someone open the door, my fingers are caught.” She doesn’t scream, or swear. And she has to repeat it twice because her calm response is so out of proportion to the situation that the family does not register what has happened. A 1950 car door has to have hurt way more than a modern one, but Great-Grandma Blanchard is a bad-ass. She would not have used that word, probably, but her great-granddaughter does.

I’m not sure if people wonder why I write. People might do it for all types of reasons, because they are hoping for money, or fame, or because stories are inside them and they simply cannot do otherwise. Most writers I have met seem to fall into the last category, but most writers I know personally write fiction. I have stories inside me, and I cannot do otherwise. But they are stories about me, about Mike. About Great-Grandma Blanchard and my Grandma who is the Superstition Queen.

About Nancy, who told me Mike loved me and that we don’t always have to throw people away. She was right, you know.

Telling these stories feels a lot like a purpose, and I simply cannot do otherwise. They will be alive as long as I am, and maybe after that, because I tell stories.