Stories

An essay.

Bryan Vale
4 min readMar 24, 2019
Chet “the Jet” Parnell, a guy who used to tell stories, and Marion Parnell. Original image

Our tendency when an elderly person launches into a long story or series of stories is to roll our eyes, grit our teeth, and ready ourselves for some tedium. Afterwards we might crack jokes about how “X is telling stories again,” where “X” is an older friend, relative, or coworker.

Anyways one time my grandpa took me out to breakfast. I was 18 and had long, disheveled hair and wore ripped-up paint-splattered jeans and duct-tape-covered shoes and a Nirvana T-shirt. He was 84 and wore a white shirt, a vest, and one of his trucker hats. It was late morning and the sun shone through the windows. The IHOP we were in was crowded and there was a brief wait before we could get a table.

My grandpa asked me about my college experience and what classes I was taking. Briefly I listed them off, and in the course of conversation it came up that I wasn’t sure what I was majoring in yet.

This was a launching point for my grandpa to start telling stories about his own education. He talked for a long time; in fact over the course of our meal he did the vast majority of our talking while I nodded and said “Yeah.”

He started telling me about the correspondence courses he’d taken while he served in the Army during World War II. (A correspondence course is basically like an online class today.) There wasn’t much rhyme or reason to the classes he took. He just studied whatever sounded interesting at the time, whenever he had time. This part went unsaid, but he hadn’t had much formal education.

The classes he took covered a variety of subjects, from accounting to advertising. After the war he took additional classes at community colleges. Whether he ever got his associate’s degree I don’t remember.

Despite the sporadic nature of his self-education, he found the things he had studied came in surprisingly handy as he looked for work. “There was a time when I was in one job interview,” he said in his accent that was very far from a drawl but still recognizably Southern, “and there was this magazine sitting on the desk. I noticed an advertisement on the back of the magazine, and I pointed it out to the fellow who was doing the interview. I pointed out to him why they had placed the text where they had in relation to the illustration, and how that drew your eyes to the advertisement’s message, because I had studied advertising in one of my courses, see. And the fellow was impressed by this. He said, ‘Well, I never thought about that!’”

In the end he managed to build a long-lasting, successful career for himself. His varied education had helped him expand his mind and pick up a lot of general knowledge, and even though he hadn’t had a specific career in mind when he started out, he was able to find his way.

When we were nearly through our pancakes and bacon he came to the point: Although I wasn’t sure what to major in at the moment, there was no reason for concern, because you never knew when something you learned would come in handy, so for now I should just keep on with my classes. It wasn’t really advice or a moral. He didn’t spend very much time driving the lesson home. He’d already said most of it in the story.

The waiter came and my grandpa complimented the food and paid the check, and we left.

Anyways this was the last time I ever spoke with my grandpa. He passed away suddenly four months later, in February 2009. It was the first and last conversation I ever had with him adult-to-adult, and it was mostly him telling me stories.

A lot of people have given me a lot of advice over the course of my life. But looking back, it astounds me how frequently I have mentally referred back to this story my grandpa related to me over breakfast when I was a teenager, compared to all the other advice I’ve gotten that I don’t remember.

At times when I have felt directionless, or felt like I had no idea what I was doing or why, I will think about my grandpa sitting across the table from me and telling me about all the things he studied as a young man. I’ve been able to use the story he told me as a way to patch up the missing or weak parts of myself.

I hate maudlin “stories are important” essays. But—they sort of are important.

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Bryan Vale

I am a Bay Area-based writer. I write fiction, technical content, personal essays, and amateur critiques. My Medium profile is mostly for the last two.