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My dad was an avid storyteller, and it was from listening to him that I learned how to tell a good story. My dad was especially good at painting a picture, remembering (and making up dialogue) and adding in background information about the people in his stories. He was fond of telling the same stories over and over again, and, I noticed that as the years went by, that some of the facts in his stories changed.

That’s how stories develop in a writer’s mind, or in this case, in a storyteller’s mind. The stories happen one way and we remember the incident in a slightly different way, and then the story retold takes on a life of its own. That’s what happened with my father’s stories.

My father told so many stories with so many variations that, after a while, I wasn’t sure whether or not to believe his stories at all. But it didn’t matter because I learned a valuable lesson from him about stories. Stories evolve with the telling. Details are added, forgotten, changed or embellished. Stories change because we change. We own a story when we tell it often, and even if the story is part fact and part fiction, we believe every word of it.

That’s what probably happened with my dad, but he’s not around to ask anymore. The way he remembered his life experiences changed over time with each telling, so he told the story a little differently each time. He may have remembered a detail in one telling that he didn’t remember in the last. Or maybe he just liked the way people listened to his stories, and he wanted to add details that made the store more interesting, more vivid or more shocking.

When he told us the story of how his grandfather came from Spain, became a Texas Ranger and married his grandmother, the story was a little different each time he told it. Sometimes, his grandmother was a Navaho and sometimes she was an Apache. Sometimes, his grandfather bought her from her father, the chief of his tribe, for four cows and sometimes it was six goats. No matter what the truth of the transaction was, it illustrates how people lived in Texas in the late 1800′s.

The father from the movie Big Fish reminded me of my dad. A dying father tells his son the story of his life, a life the son is not all that familiar with. The stories are farfetched and fanciful, so the son doesn’t know what to believe. Like the movie, my dad’s stories were sometimes a bit farfetched and fanciful. My dad didn’t tell me the stories of his life on his deathbed; he simply told them to me throughout my life. And with each telling, details were added or left out, changed or embellished.

My father will always be remembered by all who knew him for his love of storytelling. I learned to love a good story by listening to his stories for as long as I can remember. In retrospect, it didn’t matter whether or not the facts were true or imagined; what was important was the journey he took me on and the people I met along the way. These people, my ancestors, have become real people to me. As I remember their stories as told to me by my father, I add my own details and they will continue to live on in my imagination.