Be the Storyteller – Part 3

Stories help illustrate and ground more esoteric concepts. In the story within this series, I’m using the tale to illustrate topics such as developing another factor of your personality, pursuing a dream and moving forward with life.

You can think of this as a theme.

For Martha Stewart, I say the theme is how to create beauty at home, self-reliance in knowing techniques to create beauty, and enjoying those creations.

What will be the major point or lesson of your story?

Now, on with the story from Part 2…

Part 3 – Illustrate a Theme

So the Kimbels moved to Oregon, but it didn’t last. One day in 1929, my grandfather didn’t come home for dinner. Men from town found him behind the Fern Hill school, where he had been cutting a tree. A falling limb had broken his neck.

My grandmother did what had to be done: she packed up the children, came back to Michigan and went on with her life. She remarried, but I think part of her mourned Oregon for a long time. It became a conversation to avoid, something that was too distracting, to impractical, or too painful to bring into the present by talking about it.

She was not a sentimental person, but it is hard to remain untouched by an experience so profound, so large in family history.

George Lee passed into something like myth, almost like Camelot – a dream, briefly grasped – that has slipped away, taking on an ethereal quality like gossamer silk floating in a delicate breeze, lost to all but memory, sometimes even the memory doubted.

My father was only 4 when he returned to Michigan. He always said he wanted to go back to Oregon someday, to find his father’s grave.

And the story might have ended there, with an unfulfilled wish.

But we know Oregon was real. We added onto the story. We went there.

In 1983, I had to make a business trip out west. Remembering my father’s wish, I said, “Take me.” So we went.

We drove to Oregon and went to Rainier. We drove around the town and saw the places our ancestors saw. The story said that George Lee’s grave was on a hill overlooking the Columbia River, and it is.

I feel proud both to take a page and add a page in George Lee’s story, to reach for the distant star – because dreams are a place to start – and in middle age, to wear the mantle of the storyteller.

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Balance the factual elements with those that involve emotion to make your story memorable. What’s appropriate for your story will depend on the overall goal of your site and the business you are doing.

Just one more part to go…