Storytelling is for Always

When I was one year old, my mother and I flew from Israel to the United States because her father, my grandfather whom I never met, had just died. My father stayed behind, and our stay in Florida, which was supposed to be short, lasted nine months.

It would be a foreshadowing of my parents eventual divorce, when I was seven. But for a time, it was an extended separation.

When we left, I spoke in two-word sentences in Hebrew. When we returned, I spoke fluently, and in English, a language my father barely knew. But my father understood the very first thing I said to him when he greeted us at the port of Haifa, where our ship had docked. He told me about this meeting many times. He said I looked at him, took his hand and said, “Daddy, tell me a story.”

I forgot whatever English I knew not long after. I would learn it (or re-learn) some years later in school, as a second language. But I knew this sentence because in re-telling my father always said it in English.

Tell me a story. No matter what or where, no matter how or whom. There are always the stories and the storytellers who tell them.

📚~Keep telling stories~📚