Telling It My Way

I reckon I should’ve known better than to open my mouth that day at the diner—the Roadrunner Cafe, right off U.S. 50, with the cracked vinyl booths and that crooked ceiling fan that spins like it’s got arthritis. But I’d just finished my eggs and toast, and something about how the morning light was hitting the Formica made me think about my Uncle Luke and the time he tried to baptize a goat.

So I started telling that story.

Now, I didn’t mean to draw a crowd. But you know how it is in a small town like Dayton—if there’s laughter floating out of a booth, people start drifting over like moths to a porch light.

I told it like I always do—not fancy, not fast. Just plain and steady, like I was whittling a stick.

I told them about Uncle Luke’s home-rigged livestock trough, the old hymnal blowing in the wind, and the goat, whose opinion was unconsulted. Folks laughed until they cried, and a few snorted.

One man shook his head and said, “You ever think about writing that stuff down?”

That’s when it hit me.

See, it’s not that the stories themselves are all that earth-shattering. Half of them are more about the way things felt than they went. Maybe Uncle Luke didn’t sing “Shall We Gather at the River” while wearing his Sunday suspenders, but in my mind, that’s how it always plays.

The goat? It might’ve been a sheep. Doesn’t matter. The feeling’s true.

There’s something about telling a story how you remember it—and not how it happened, but how it settled in your bones. Folks respond to that.

Not because they had a goat or an Uncle Luke, but because they had something like it. Maybe it was a neighbor with a lawnmower that only started on Tuesdays–or a grandma who used Vicks VapoRub for everything from bee stings to heartbreak.

And when you tell it plain, like you’re sitting on a porch snapping peas or shucking corn, people lean in. They recognize the rhythm, the smell, the sound of it.

That’s why I keep writing this way. Not for applause. Not for clicks. But because these little stories—about stubborn chickens and misfiring tractors and granddads who told tall tales—they mean something.

They remind us who we are.

In a world where everything’s sped up and slicked down, this kind of storytelling is like an old quilt—faded in places, patched in others, but warm and hand-stitched. It’s got character. It lets people rest, imagine, and maybe see themselves in the story.

So yeah, I write it this way because it’s honest, even if the facts are fuzzy. It’s friendly, even if the subject’s tough. And it’s mine, even if I hand it over to you.

And if you stick around long enough, I’ll tell you the one about Ma Sanders, her prize-winning pumpkin pie, and the bear with a sweet tooth and no sense of danger.

But that’s another story.