For Dad on His 58th Birthday

This was taken from a brief journal entry I wrote on December 18, 2007.
Happy 58th Birthday, Dad! I can’t really say these things in front of you, but like you, I express myself better in writing.


IN NEED OF A GOOD STORY

My father isn’t a good storyteller. 

Which is why i could never figure how, even after all these years, i can still vividly remember the stories he told me when i was much younger. 

Dad had this annoying habit of leaving stories unfinished. Most of the time, he would fall asleep even before he could finish. He would be right in the middle of a tale and then – the familiar silence and the subsequent snore. Whenever he fell asleep, Dad was impervious to my persistent efforts at waking him up and making him continue with his story.

Because of this, Dad often told stories in random fragments which you had to re-arrange in order to build a plot. He would talk about his own Tatay, my grandfather, who fought during the Korean War. 

Then he would fall asleep. 

The next chance I get to listen to him, he would be talking about his own grandmother and how she had this “anting-anting” that made her invisible to the Japanese. 

Then he would fall asleep. 

By the next episode, he would be telling me about his own Nanay, my grandmother, and how she saw a “tiyanak” eating a ripe mango. 

Then he would fall asleep. 

Again.

In spite of protracted plots that spanned several incongruous segments, I was captivated by Dad’s stories. While I knew, even at that young age, that some of his tales were rather incredible, I listened attentively and pretended that I believed in every detail he mentioned. Tiyanak and anting-anting notwithstanding.

Dad’s narrative style was not spectacular. In fact, he narrated stories as if he were merely suggesting and providing simple captions for the images in my mind. He couldn’t really paint scenes with words. He wasn’t poetic nor dramatic. He spoke plainly, and yet, somehow, he stirred my imagination. I don’t know how he did that.

Even now, Dad still isn’t a good storyteller. 

Though he doesn’t fall asleep anymore with his own stories, he already fumbles with his sentences and has developed an even more terrible sense of plot flow and timing.

But when he tries to tell me a story, I listen.

And I don’t know how he does that.