We’ve all talked to that broken record with their favorite stories on repeat. Sometimes, it can try our patience. Here’s a Perspective from Elizabeth Fishel.
“Bobup, what happened?” asked our three-year-old granddaughter Nellie of her grandfather—and then asked again and again and again– after a small, unexpected mishap on the beach. While Nellie and our grown sons looked on, Bob suddenly slammed his knee on a big rock hidden beneath the waves. Blood trickled down his leg, and Nellie’s father and uncle rushed to help.
Still, the sight of this injury on her formerly flawless grandfather rocked Nellie’s worldview. She had to hear the story of “Bopup and the wock,” over and over until she mastered it.
I was reminded of my beloved father at the other end of his life. When he hit his 90s, he began telling and telling and telling his favorite stories until the rest of the family was able to recite them by heart. There was the one about parachuting his beagle Laddie out of an airplane during the Second World War. Or the one about becoming a stickball champion in his Bronx neighborhood, because he could hit three sewers. Or the one about how he reconnected with an old flame from fifty years earlier after our mother died.
Occasionally we’d tire of these repetitions, until our younger son pointed out that for his grandfather, these stories were like favorite songs. “You wouldn’t sing ‘You Are My Sunshine’ or “Blowin’ in the Wind” just once, would you?” he said. If you cherish the words and the message, you want to sing the songs over and over, savoring them.