How Did You Fall in Love With Stories?

I was raised in a scorching town of about three thousand folks set in the steamy and fragrant pinewoods in the south of Georgia, seventy miles inland from Brunswick, on the Atlantic Ocean. 

Baxley had a Main Street, a post office with a marble floor where our box, number 162, had belonged to my great-grandfather, and a water tower. It had a courthouse that had recently abolished “Colored Only” signs. It had a handful of Jewish families and one family of Vietnamese refugees. It had a juke joint (the Ponderosa), where I never went, and a country club (Pine Forest), where I also never went.

My mother’s people were from Baxley, my father’s people were from Baxley. Both lines shot a long way into the past in that place, and before that, jumped a series of migrations beginning mostly in the British Isles, with ancestors who were clan-based, tribal, and fiercely independent.

In my sleepy, tense, and careful birthplace, everybody was connected to everybody else, marginally or profoundly, usually in multiple fashion, the way parts on a car or elements of a landscape are linked. Our lives snapped together like Legos. A person without connections was marginal, alien, and dangerous.

From these braids and bundles of relationships, stories were born. 

A mile north of town lay a junkyard, where I lived. My father, a junk man, trucked in stories more than he did batteries, alternators, and tie-rod ends. Born into poverty and into a family threaded with mental illness, Franklin Ray was a heroic character, as tall and handsome as Elvis, as complicated as Fred Sanford. He never wore glasses, he never went bald. He was larger than life, mythic, brilliant—he would spend time in the state’s psychiatric hospital.

People knew my father as a problem-solver (Can this radiator be fixed?) and as a money man (How much will you give me?). They arrived at the junkyard to inquire, to make an offer, to pay a visit, to find out, to pawn wedding rings, to sell hubcaps.

I heard stories endlessly. 

The characters in the stories were people I knew or people connected to someone I knew. The settings of the stories were places I knew. 

From a very young age I understood myself to be part of a vast, tightly woven, land-based literature, whether I could name it as such or not. That’s how I came to fall in love with stories.

Question

What about you? How did it happen for you?