The Second Time Around

We sat at the table with pies and apricot bars and bread and fruit arrayed before us. We sat there and nursed our tea and ate our sweets. And we talked.

We have talked often in this family at tables like that one: talked about our lives, reminisced about the years gone by, projected the years to come. We have talked often that way, sitting around a table by the window telling our stories.

Have you heard my story about the snake? I asked, thinking that they all certainly had. But their eyes lit up expectantly. None of them had heard it. Trudy began laughing, knowing what was to come.

It was the kind of story that requires room. So I stood up and backed away from my chair, standing in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. There was plenty of room there to swing my arms. This was the kind of story that required that sort of thing: big gestures, wide eyes, a loud voice, and great swings of your arms.

It was a story of a man, a dog, and a hapless snake. Not much of a story, if the truth be known, but the kind of story you can squeeze for effect. So I squeezed. And I swung my arms as if I held the blue axe in my hands. And I gestured with the look on the surprised snake's face when he pulled his head out of the hole, my missed axe swing having only grazed his neck.

And as I stood in the doorway swinging my arms and making faces, I told them how the snake got away and how the dog looked down at the hole and then up at the man. There wasn't really any more to it than that: dog finds snake, man fetches axe, man swings axe, man misses snake, snake gets away. But there was something in the telling of it, something in the look in their eyes and the laughter that filled the room, that made it so much better the second time around.

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