Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Catholic
People are Made of Stories

People are Made of Stories

Last updated on: January 14, 2021 at 8:32 pm by Mary Pezzulo

People are Made of Stories 2021-01-14T20:32:25-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

My great aunt and great uncle had COVID-19.

They don’t anymore; they managed to pull through. Uncle is doing as well as before, but Aunt is more frail, and she had been frail to begin with. It might not be long now. I likely won’t see her again.

She is my blood relative; the last surviving sibling of my beloved grandfather who died in 2015.

This is the end of a generation.

Grandpa used to tell us stories about his childhood. He was an expert storyteller. I could never convey to you the liveliness and vibrancy he put into the telling of the stories, as if he were still right there, living them for the first time. It struck me this week, that it won’t be very long before everyone who witnessed those things firsthand will be gone. It won’t be Grandpa’s generation remembering the past anymore; it will be me remembering someone’s remembrance. And when you read this, it will be one more step removed, a text version of somebody’s memory of a lively story in the oral tradition, and that’s another kind of death.

Still, I keep trying to remember, and write them down.

Great Grandpa’s children didn’t call him “Dad” or “Papa,” but “Blippie.” His children also had nicknames; Grandpa was Chuck or Utch, and the others were Bud, Dottie, Tate, Tote and Pat. I never met Blippie, but I’ve seen photographs. He looked like an elongated version of my grandfather with a very high forehead. Blippie was of Welsh and Irish descent. His wife, Mary’s, people came from Greenbriar County, West Virginia. They were about 130% Irish at a conservative estimate, the proudest Irish people in the world. They gave some of their land to build a tiny Catholic church on, so that the priest who came to say Mass now and then wouldn’t have to say it from the back of his truck. The road that goes by the old farm has been called “Catholic Church Road” ever since. I’ve only seen one photograph of Great Grandmother Mary, a brown and gray one from when she was a teenager– a beautiful girl with dark hair and braids. Great Grandmother Mary died of a gall bladder condition when Great Aunt was a baby and Grandpa was not yet three.

Great Grandpa Blippie had the paperwork in hand to put his children in an orphanage, which is what widowed Catholic men did in the 1920s, but he just couldn’t bear to. His children stayed with him. They tumbled around the house and were raised by housekeepers. Their dog, Pluto, walked them to the Catholic school in the mornings and waited outside until school let out to walk them home; he did this every school day for more than a decade. When Great Aunt graduated from the Catholic school, the nuns gave Pluto a degree as well.

Grandpa had a paper route. He delivered papers to everybody in the neighborhood and insisted to Blippie that he would pay for his own room and board with the money he made. He memorized the obstacles and dangers of every block of his route; he always had a paper rolled up and ready to stuff in the mouth of the barking dog who lived at one house. Once the dog had a paper in his mouth, it would stop playing vicious and act friendly, and bring the paper back to its master without a sound.

Once, Grandpa made the mistake of asking his brother, Bud, to do him a favor: “I’ll give you a quarter if you go collect the weekly paper money for me.” Bud went and collected the money, which came to a few dollars. And then he kept it. Bud insisted that since he had done the work of collecting the money, the money was something he earned. Grandpa couldn’t convince him of how a paper route really worked. They quarreled about it for a long time. I don’t think Uncle Bud paid Grandpa back in all the years they were alive, even though they joked about the paper route money whenever they were together. Once, when they were very old men, Grandpa leant Uncle Bud a few dollars while they were on a trip. Uncle Bud said “Put it on my tab.”

One afternoon, Grandpa made the mistake of letting Great Aunt Pat deliver the papers for him, but she dumped half of them down a storm drain when she got tired. Grandpa went to every house that didn’t get a paper to personally apologize and tell them not to pay him for that day. But every single customer who lost a paper still paid Grandpa the full amount at the end of the month. Grandpa always told that story with awe in his voice– all these decades later, he couldn’t believe how kind his neighbors were.

One evening, Grandpa and the children caused an emergency that the whole town remembered ever afterwards. There was an enormous vacant lot outside their house where the grass grew very high, and the children liked to walk back and forth on the grass to tamp it down. One day, they walked single file to make “hallways” in the grass, and then they trampled patches of grass in the shape of a square, to make “rooms.” One of the rooms they designated the lobby, and another the kitchen; they made a stove in the kitchen out of rocks. The rest of the rooms were bedrooms. The children played hotel all afternoon. Then my father went inside to take a bath, but Pat stayed behind. Pat wanted to see if you could really cook in the rock stove. She went inside for some matches.

And that’s how she started a fire that burned down the entire vacant lot, before Grandpa had gotten out of the bath.

“I was singing in the tub and didn’t even hear the fire engines,” my grandpa said. You can’t understand how this story is comedy either unless you see his bewildered face as he tells about getting out of the bath and finding all the excitement happened without him.

In the summers, Grandpa and his siblings stayed with their Aunt Vossie, way out in the mountains.

I never saw a photograph of Aunt Vossie; for all I know she never had a picture taken. She was already old when my Grandpa lost his mother. I imagine her looking like Aunt Em in The Wizard of Oz and having a similar temperament. She ran a great big farm and a whole team of hired hands. Her house was a very well-equipped farmhouse for that era in that part of Appalachia; it even had running water, of a sort. There was a pipe set up from the spring to the kitchen spigot, and the spigot kept running constantly because if she turned it off, the pipes would rust.

My grandfather’s summer job was to bring Aunt Vossie’s hired hands water. This was a full-time occupation. He had a bucket and a place to play and wait near the spring. Every time the hired hands yelled “Water boy, water boy!” my grandfather would run to the spring with his bucket, fill it, and run to the cornfield. The hired hands gulped dipper after dipper of water, more water than you could imagine one man could hold; he ran back and forth with the bucket until they were all satisfied, and then he went to play until it was time to do it again.

One particularly hot day, Grandpa heard the hired hands shouting “Water boy, water boy!” He got his bucket and ran. But when he got there, he found Aunt Vossie’s enormous collie dog had gotten to the spring first. The dog’s name was Compy because when he first wandered up to the farmhouse, Aunt Vossie had said “We got comp’ny!” Compy was making himself comfortable in the spring. He wasn’t being tidy about it. The water was cloudy and filmed with shed collie hair.

Grandpa stood staring at the spring.

“Water boy! Water boy!” insisted the farm hands. “Where’s my water?”

“Compy’s in the spring!” shouted Grandpa.

One of the farm hands came to see what the delay was. He said “That’s all right, just wait.”

My grandpa waited. The dog got out of the spring. After that, it only took several minutes before the clean water bubbling up from underground had washed away the remains of Compy’s afternoon dip, and the spring water looked clean again. Grandpa fetched his bucket of water for the farm hands, and they drank it.

You’re not getting the true impact of that story because Grandpa isn’t telling it to you. You should have seen the awkward trepidation on his face when he said “Compy’s in the spring!” and the relief when it all came out right. You can’t understand why this story is the funniest thing in the world unless you’ve seen it acted out by an old Welsh-Irish-American man with a high forehead.

I think Aunt Vossie’s farm was where Grandpa got his aversion to chicken, and the reason Great Aunt is a vegetarian as well. Being an impressionable child from in town witnessing Aunt Vossie dispatch a chicken would have that effect.

I also think the farm in West Virginia is where Grandpa got his love of nature. He was an avid hiker, gardener and birdwatcher his entire life. He had a house on a triple lot with an orchard; he brought us great big grocery bags of fruit in the summer. Once I rode to a family reunion in West Virginia in the back of his mini van, and the trunk was piled with hundreds of fresh tree-ripened peaches. The smell of the van was tantalizing; I kept reaching behind me for a snack.

I suppose my grandfather’s garden is the reason why I love to garden— I am the third generation who owes it to Aunt Vossie and the hired hands. I suppose his love of nature and the family reunions in West Virginia are why I love nature so much.

I wonder how much of Grandpa’s personality was built out of stories, stories I don’t know, stories he heard from Blippie and Aunt Vossie and even Mary.

I wonder how much of who they were, was made up of stories they heard.

Stories are the most powerful force the world has ever known, because stories are what people are made of.

And now I’ve given you some of mine.

Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, visit our donate page.

America

Appalachia

Previous Post

January 13, 2021

Lisa Montgomery is Being Tied to a Bed

Next Post

January 14, 2021 The United States is Executing the Second Disabled Person in 48 Hours

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category abortion Abuse Advent America American Christianity angel angels Annunciation Appalachia apparition apparition chaser apparition chasers apparition culture art art review babies baby baby Jesus Bad Lip Reading bad statue contest bath beauty Bible story blog blogkeeping blood book review Brandon Sanderson breastfeeding bus Catholic catholic conspiracy alarmism Catholic Oppositional Disorder Charismatic Renewal Charlie the Cat chastity Christ Christian idenitity Christianity and Judaism Chronic Illness clean clothing COD piece comedy compassion conscience conspiracy theory conversion cop-on-black violence Crucifixion cry of the poor culture Daesh Daily Saints death death penalty devotional diaconate diaper diapers dirty disability Donald Trump Dorothy Day dream drugs Eastern Catholicism Eastern Christianity education election election update Elsewhere on Patheos empathy environment Fear feminism film review fish flashback fluffy buns food Franciscan University of Steubenville Friendship Room fun Gabriel gardening gospel hair-splitting Heaven hell heresy Hillary Clinton history Holly the Witch Holy Spirit holy war Homeschooling homosexuality horror human dignity humor Icon idol immigrants infection inter-religious dialogue Interpretation of Scripture Islam Jesus Jihad Joseph joy laity and lay vocations lamb dinner laundry lent lgbtq literature love manners Mary Medicine and Science Meditation mercy mess milk misogyny Missouri monasticism monster motherhood mourn with those mourn movies movis music mystery nature neurodiversity New Pro-Life Movement news nonsense nostalgia O antiphons obituary objectification Ohio Valley Ordinary Time ordination Ordo Amoris parable paradox Passover peanut butter personal beliefs pets philosophy Planet Charismatic poetry politics polls poop Pope Francis Pope Leo power in the Church prayer prayer request prayers preferential option for non-violence president presidential election priest primary private revelation pro-life prophecy Public face of Catholicism Pure Flix Q and A race racism random rape rape. sexuality reader's request Reckoners refugee religious trauma ressurrection Right to life Saints saints and celebrations same-sex same-sex marriage satire scandal secular feasts seder Seven Joys Seven Last Words sex sexual ethics sexuality silencing six months skid row slavery social justice Speculative fiction spiritual abuse spoon stain story suffering suffrage suffragette Sunday Gospel temple Tenebrae Responsories Terror the exorcist The Friendship Room The New Pro-Life Movement Things I Learned on the Internet tin cup traffic true story tv review Uncategorized USCCB vice and temptation violence Virtue virtue and vice war Way of the Cross whimsy whole life women's ordination work of mercy Year A

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What will happen to Satan at the end of time, according to Revelation 20:10?

Select your answer to see how you score.

He will roam the earth forever He will be thrown into the lake of fire He will be cast out of heaven again He will repent and be forgiven