There’s a point in your life where you go from imagining that your parents might possibly die one day to being told that they will be leaving you in a few months. I have faced that moment with both my parents and have been in the room when the doctor has attempted to guide them toward this devastating new reality. For the weeks and months that I watched both my parents die, I kept drawing on a few memorable stories from their lives. The story of my young seamstress mother making an extra piece for herself each time she was hired to sew garments for a bridal trousseau. The story of my father working two jobs as a new immigrant in New York: a day job at a car wash and a night job at a glass factory.
When all else, including the people in our lives, have disappeared, all we are left with are the stories: funny stories, odd stories, tales of woe as well as joy.
I have always loved stories. I grew up in a family of very lively storytellers who recounted their days encounter by encounter, and even voiced the people they’d met as though they were characters in a play. The elders in my life were also very fond of folktales, myths, and fables, which were perfect narrative models for a budding writer.
Stories, I believe, are gifts offered to us to help us make better sense of our lives, and the lives of others. Stories, I once read somewhere, are like the type of paintings you find yourself fully absorbed in. You know that something happened before and after the image you’re looking at, but while you’re taking the painting in, you wholly fall into it, and find it hard to move on, even after you have indeed moved on.
Unlike reading a novel, there’s a stop and go feel to reading a collection of stories. I hope readers will think of the experience as somewhat akin to entering a great big house inhabited by many different types of people who are eager to tell you their stories, and are ready to show you the way they’re living, or have lived, a particularly striking and memorable moment, or period of their lives. At times it will be hard to leave one person or group behind and move on to the next, but the joy of reading a collection of stories is also in the accumulation of encounters, which in the case of this book, all center around love.
“We Love,” the poet Nikki Giovanni has written, “because it’s the only true adventure.” I hope that you will enjoy going on this adventure of story-love with me. I chose these particular eight stories for this collection because they are about the great adventure that is love, be it love of country—new and old—parental love, romantic love, and our successes and failures at trying to love. I hope that you will also find rays of hope in these stories. Take breathers and breaks to let them sink in. Look up the songs mentioned in some of the stories. And remember the words of one of one of my favorite characters, Callie, in “Seven Stories”: “No story is ever complete.” I might just add one thing. No story is every complete without you, The Reader.
