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Tell Me a Story by Diane Dougherty He has tanned and muscled arms and hands calloused from years of hard work in the coal mines. Embedded just under the skin of those arms and those hands are bits of anthracite coal, remnants of a mine explosion that nearly took his life and did take one lung, leaving the other barely capable of breath. Yet, those hands pick tomatoes, weed the garden, and pluck raspberries with a delicacy that belies their appearance. “Daddy, why did you go back to work in the mines after the war instead of running away to be a cowboy?” He pauses his gardening and looks at me thoughtfully. “Uncle Guilio’s been telling stories again, has he?” “Daddy, Uncle told us you wanted to be a cowboy. Isn’t that true?” “There’s lots of things that aren’t lies, honey, that aren’t exactly true either.” My father understood the concept of “story truth.” In our family there are lots of stories: “The day the pig got loose” “Ma takes a stand” “Daddy chases Poncho Villa across the Rio Grande” “Anthony breaks his arm pretending to be Superman” Each story told again and again over Thanksgiving dinner, during picnics at the lake, or on leisurely Sunday afternoons. Stories with the same plot lines told a little bit differently depending on the narrator. “There’s a lot of things that aren’t lies, honey, that aren’t exactly true either.” Is that why, when I read a memory story, one of my sisters invariably says, “That’s not the way it happened at all.” My memories are clear as crystal; they just aren’t true facts, apparently. The morning I questioned Daddy might have really been late afternoon; it might have happened not in the garden but on the back porch. Maybe it was raining—a thunderstorm, and since I am terrified of thunderstorms, Daddy tells me a story to distract me from my fear, a story about chasing bandits when he was in the U.S. Cavalry. I am thinking of all of this because of the trailer for War Horse, a movie to be released on Christmas Day. When he sees the trailer my grandson, Collin, wants to know about his great-