My Father and Mr. Thurber

“The room reeked of camphor. ‘Ugh, ugh,’ choked Briggs, like a drowning man, for he had almost succeeded in stopping his breathing under the deluge of pungent spirits.”

A giggle shook me at the sight and sound of my father’s recitation of the old story, and although my seven-year-old brain had not the vocabulary to know the words “camphor,” “deluge,” or “pungent,” storyteller my father was, I always understood.

He gagged and choked like Briggs, scrunching his nose at the clearly repulsive substance that must be camphor, and maintained a sort of gravitas that brought life to this Briggs’ character.

Each person on the page had a different voice, cadence, and unique mannerisms, all hilariously executed by my personal reader. Who knew a short story about falling out of a bed, published nearly seventy years prior to my birth, with words unknown to me, could draw and keep my attention at such an age when the attention span is fleeting? And yet, enthralled I was.

The short story was called “The Night the Bed Fell” by James Thurber and was part of a collection of comedic short stories, memoir style, in a book called “A Thurber Carnival.”

The book was old and nondescript, with no cover picture, only the title and author written on the spine. The cover was a faded light brown, and the spine forest green. The pages were yellowed with age and if you were to reveal the publishing date within, it would read 1945. It had been my father’s grandfather’s book, passed down to him.

On rare nights when my father was able to return home from work before my bedtime, he would read seven or eight pages from the book to me. The print was small, and the pages were long, filled with complicated words that I could only make out the meaning of through the context of my father’s acting. Therefore, seven or eight pages at a time had to be enough, though I always begged for just one more.

I fell in love with books listening to my father read. The most mundane stories became the model of intrigue when he told them. I believe I learned imagination from my father, if that is a thing that can be learned.

My father could keep an audience captive reading any book, but Thurber’s writing was special. I could tell, even at that age, that he wrote in a style familiar to a world I had never known. His writing challenged my young mind in a way that I discovered I quite enjoyed. And like my father, Mr. Thurber had a talent that allowed him to tell the most ordinary stories in the most captivating manner.

At a time when my father had to leave for work before I awoke, and generally could not be home until well after I was asleep, these moments between us, bonding over James Thurber’s stories and a love of reading passed down from one generation to the next, remain some of my most cherished memories.

Ultimately, our shared love of reading developed into something more for me. I wanted to create the stories that captivated young minds and encouraged imagination. I wanted to bring people together through the art of storytelling, as it had my father and me. I wanted to inspire the light in a person’s eyes that I saw in my father’s every time he read a story he loved.

Today, here I am, writing stories no matter if only a single person reads them, and hoping my father will someday know that he is the reason I dream so big.

Thanks, dad, and thank you, James Thurber.