The Power of Storytelling
In many ways, my father was not an easy man. Something of a martinet, he lived with a huge amount of anxiety that he freely displaced onto others and, while he was enormously smart, his view of the world was, in certain respects, quite circumscribed. A true child of the Depression, he grew up behind his parent’s dress shop in the Bronx and turned to popular cultural icons of the time like Horatio Alger and Dink Stover to figure out how to navigate the world. He lived to be 91 years old, mostly with some real quality of life, and when he died, I eulogized him. Trying to figure out what aspects felt right to pick out of our complicated 60-year relationship, I focused on how he had given me a love for stories.