January, 2021

In the Fall of 1992, while traveling through Australia on a 3 month sojourn, I met a German woman in Darwin. Birgit was an editor for a publishing company in Hannover, and was also traveling through Australia. As it happened our travel intentions took the same clockwise route, so we ended up traveling together for the next 6 weeks (Darwin to Cairns to Whit Sunday Islands to Fraser Island to Sydney, with much more in between). Those 6 weeks were an amazing time, a story yet untold but worth being told.

Birgit was a voracious reader, and my latent interest in reading – long dormant since grammar school, with a brief surge right after graduating from college – was reignited.  But even more interesting and new to me, was story telling. Each night, either on walks or in bed or sitting on a beach, we would tell a story to each other. A story that was fictional and created right on the spot. Sometimes, the story would be mine, sometimes it would be Birgit’s, sometimes we would create a story together, one of us talking for a few minutes and then suddenly stopping, leaving the continuation of the story to the other (and back and forth it would go, until we reached a mutually agreed upon ending). It was truly an exciting time, to be introduced to one’s imaginative abilities at 29 years of age.

Fast forward 15 years, and I began a similar routine with Annika who was around 5 years old. At night Annika would give me a word or two, and I would create on the spot a short story using those few words as the genesis. Sometimes (rarely) I created a story that impressed myself, other times I was embarrassed at how unimaginative it was. Most of the time the stories were just OK; more than sufficient to assist a young girl to sleep.

At some point – 12? 13? – Annika was old enough to lose interest in our story routine. I only vaguely recall this time, of Annika not being as interested in stories of make believe and wanting more “Young Adult” fare (not my forte). The reason I vaguely recall this transition is that Niki and Britta were more than ready to listen to my imagination, so the routine remained with only a change in the audience. At night Niki would suggest a word, Britta would suggest a word, and off I’d go. Later, when they were a little older, on occasion they would make up a short story of their own using the 2 words, to be followed by my attempt.

Until now.

Last month, at age 13 years ~4 weeks, Niki asks one night: “When did you stop taking Annika to bed?”. I didn’t recall exactly…but a few weeks later Niki and Britta had a proposal: Instead of Andrea and I rotating each night taking the girls to bed, the girls wanted to intersperse nights where they would go to bed themselves – an appropriate step for 13 year olds.

The first night I took the girls to bed under this new organization, whereas normally they would blurt out a word of their own to start the storytelling, they didn’t ask for a story. And just like that, it’s possible our tradition has ended – just like 6 weeks of traveling through Australia.

While my daughters are my best audience, I’ll have to figure out a way to keep exercising my feeble imaginative muscle…