In 1975, I just barely graduated high school. But I wore a crown of lilacs and gardenias upon my graduation from Sunset Hill, the one square mile rock, my beloved townies, the sleepless nights. My Mother placed the crown on my head and recounted to her friend proudly…”Did you know she read that alphabetical cocktail book at the age of nine and memorized each and every drink? I think she has a photographic memory. Ask her anything. A pink lady. A rusty nail. She knows them all!” My Mother’s face in the moonlight admired me profusely.
“My Mother, sister and I tell each other the same stories over and over. This repetition is an incantation, an invocation of the beauties of patina, and a way of expressing complicated feelings about each other. With our tales we entertain, comfort, make order, instruct, chastise and preserve. Stories stretch. They exaggerate, make larger than life, freeze moments, name them, move them out side the present. Storytelling is the opposite of Be Here Now , but storytelling is not abstract. Storytelling is Be Here Then. This is why, in fiction, the past tense reads as if it were the present, While the present tense creates a dream like feeling.”
Blanche McCrary Boyd, The Redneck Way of Knowledge
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