I don't have many memories of my Grandfather. Those I still possess are good ones. Warm, somehow surreal memories, blurred by time and tinged with the sketchiness of haphazard recollection, but still there, and somehow the truth of them is more concrete than the actual occurrence of events.

It was a sunset for the ages: when the sun is no longer the intense bright white-out of high noon but instead a fiery incandescent orb on the horizon, seemingly about to crash into the earth before being swallowed whole by the hills surrounding our home. The sky above had lost all trace of the brilliant blue of a July afternoon and had morphed into transcendent shades of pink and orange that faded into inky blackness above. I sit on the wooden table in our backyard, watching the fireflies come out and listening to the crickets sing softly with grass in between my toes. The air is still. Time, it seems, has stopped. The reverie is broken only by my Grandfather easing open the screen door and sitting quietly beside me in time. We are alone in the universe.

Grandfather (never Grandpa or Granddad, always Grandfather) says nothing for what feels like an eternity as the lightning bugs waltz across the lawn. Grandfather turns to me eventually and says:

“Andrew, what are you going to be when you grow up?”

This question never struck me as being odd at the time, or even upon further reflection in later years. Only now does the distinction of “going to be” versus “want to be” become apparent, as though he has some knowledge of the turmoil, hesitation, and lack of motivation that will come to define my adolescence. Perhaps he sees himself in me (though how could he? I was four.), and perhaps his phrasing means nothing at all, but in this one instant his language becomes both symbolic and seared into my memory for all the time to come.

While other kids at that age would undoubtedly have said something like “a dinosaur” or “a fireman”, I instead answered his question with the first and most natural thing that came into my head.

“I'm going to be a storyteller.”

It is my own language this time which surprises me. I don't say “author”, or “writer”, or “novelist”, or “Richard Scarry” but “storyteller”, the essence of which I couldn't possibly grasp at that age. Or maybe, perhaps, I had grasped it, and only in later years have I perhaps forgotten the meaning as I lost myself in books and television and sensory delights.

He asked me to tell him a story, and I did. I invented wildly, weaving a tale of pirates and dragons, of strange and wonderful things. And it was this act that made my answer the truth. Not an author or a novelist or any other connotations and perversions, but simply, truly, a storyteller. I am not a novelist, and I am not a millionaire. But I am still a storyteller.

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