Stories From My Dad

              Stories From My Father

         In my mind’s ear, I can hear the eerie cadence of words even now. My dad would have a flock of us gathered around a campfire at night, on Brant beach of the Lake Erie shore, just south of Buffalo,New York,  during the early 1950’s. Our family had owned cottages there and rented the land from the Seneca Indians since the 1920’s, when granddad and his brothers used to run whiskey over from Long Point in Canada to Silver Creek, during prohibition years.

         By this time of the evening, dad would have downed a few beers to “loosen up the pipes.” We sat expectantly, waiting for the exciting yarns that were to come. Television was still in its infancy then and many people, us included, didn’t yet have sets in our homes, let along try to drag one of the huge boxes , filled with giant cathode ray tubes, out to the beach where indoor plumbing was still a novelty and water came from the well or the lake.

      “Luke, tell us a story,” Dad would begin. He would then launch into some fascinating tale of ghosts who has lost their golden arms and came looking, always looking, for the miscreant who had taken them. It was a time in America when all things alien and all things eerie held us in rapt fascination.

      You could feel the hairs rise on the back of your neck as dad intoned in a stentorian whisper,  “and the ghost got closer and closer, always whispering ‘who stole my golden arm?’ The conclusion was always some precipitous denouement with a gesture or sound that made us jump or cry out. Dad was a showman, as well as a story teller.

Afterwards, no matter how brave a front we put on, we  listened intently to the night sounds of the beach around us, dreading that odd squeak of an opening door, or other mysterious sounds in the night, that could portend the arrival of something that we never wished to see. The feelings of course vanished with the rising sun. But, they always lurked at the back of our consciousness, when night fell and the blackness again surrounded us.

We never walked by the closed door, of our third story attic, without wondering who or what had taken roost there since the passing of the sunlight hours. And forget about walking into the stygian darkness of the basement. That would never happen. Basements and attics are for the revealing and protective light of daytime only.

If there was an adult Stephen King around, in the early fifties, he would have made a fortune capturing and writing the stories that my father told us. We didn’t then know about the chilling tales of Edgar Allen Poe or H.P. Lovecraft. Those were spine-tinglers for us yet to discover. I don’t think my dad knew about them either. He and his people were honest workmen who had little formal education. Dad’s brother, Uncle Edward, used to say that they had gotten "hit in the ass with a third grade speller,” for an education. It wasn’t true of course, but all of his family could tell a good story when prompted by a few beers.

Still, they came from Hibernian stock where ancestors for thousand of years had sat around the smoky peat fires of Eire and talked of fairies and banshees of old, always awalk in the eerie darkness of the night. And always looking for the unwary.

It is only now, some sixty years later, that these same stories dad told us, float upward from the dark recesses of my childhood imagination, when we were afraid of everything! I guess I have more time to reflect on them now, in retirement, when the age-old memories surface first and what we had for lunch yesterday is a forgotten mystery.

And each year the mental picture of my father, alive and laughing in his vibrant 30’s, becomes a little sharper for me. And I again imagine hearing him say “Luke, tell us a story.”

       Thanks, dad! May the roads rise up to meet you.

                           -30-

                     (697 words)

                        Joseph Xavier Martin

                     May 5, 2015