Having just spent the first Christmas without my parents, I remembered this blog post I originally wrote a while ago for another site. It’s a favorite Dad story. 

Enjoy.

My Dad’s War

I’ve known that life is a story since I was a child standing big-eyed and listening to my Appalachian relatives tell hair-raising tales about mountain folk. However, it took me years to learn that stories can also create a life.

You see, not too long ago, my niece invited my father to her history class to talk about his experiences in World War II. He spoke of being a platoon leader, of a soldier’s life, and fighting. According to the teacher, the class hung on his every word. My niece glowed in the limelight, the teacher was pleased, and the students interested. What they did not know—including my father—was he’d never been in the war.

He was in the service after WWII and before Korea. His army experiences get all muddled-up for him. My father has Alzheimer’s. The problem is, despite the disease, Dad’s a great storyteller. Only now, he believes his own stories.

Born and raised in the hollers of Kentucky, Dad was the last child of twelve. He had to talk to be noticed; and he talked with a passion. Then as our family grew, we pestered him to repeat favorite stories. These included the relative who got bit by a rattle snake and saved his life by drinking a quart of moonshine, how Dad learned to run faster on his knees than his feet while working in the coal mines, and the times he had outpacing the law in his 1941 Mercury Coupe while running moonshine.

Perhaps these are not the sort of stories we tell children today, but they gave a mythic quality to my father. He was faster, stronger, and wilder than all my friend’s fathers—and he truly was for many years. He raced motorcycles, he won championships in archery, and he built speed boats and water-skied—barefoot. He did anything he “set his mind to,” as he used to say. At seventy-four he was hill-climbing four-wheelers. In his mid-seventies he was still bear and wild boar hunting, though Mom had to go along to make sure he didn’t get lost. And always, he had a storyteller’s silver tongue to embellish his exploits.

Dad remains a talker. At eighty-two-with the disease advancing—there are new stories about leading groups of men, fighting in a boxing ring, doing deeds in places, and at events, he’s never been—like in WWII. We used to cluck and say, “But Dad, you couldn’t have done that . . .” Not anymore.

One day, my mother told me she’d let him go to my niece’s class to speak because it kept him alive. That’s when I realized the stories Dad tells these days are the chapters of a life he is still in the process of creating. For him, it is a necessary world where despite his weakening body, his worsening eyesight and his tremors, he fights a good war-and lives to tell the story.

Happy holidays—and keep telling your stories!

Shutta