A Story From Charley

This beautiful peice was written from one of my favorite tellers - Charley brings love, humility and kindness to the storytelling stage!

The Keeper of Our Stories

For most of my life, I was a CPA.  My world was numbers, balance sheets, income statements, tax regulations and rules. Numbers behave. If something doesn't balance, you find the mistake and fix it.

Then my wife, Pat, died after 47 years of marriage.

Suddenly, the books didn't balance anymore.

Well-meaning people told me to keep busy, get out, meet people—as if grief were something you could deduct over five years.

Somewhere along the way, I stumbled into storytelling.

At 78 years old, I found myself standing in front of a microphone telling stories to rooms full of strangers. And something unexpected happened. They laughed. Sometimes they got quiet. Sometimes afterward someone would come up and tell me my story reminded them of something that had happened in their own life.

That's when I began to understand what storytelling really does.

I've lived long enough to accumulate a lot of stories—about growing up, work, marriage, raising a family, mistakes I've made, people I've loved and people I've lost. For years, I thought of them simply as memories.

Now I understand that when we tell our stories, something else happens. A room full of strangers begins discovering the things they have in common.

And the people who aren't with us anymore get to walk into the room again.

Storytelling hasn't erased my grief or given me a new life neatly replacing the old one. But it has given me a way to carry that old life forward while continuing to build this one.

Maybe that's why we need storytellers.

We aren't just telling stories.

We're keeping them.

Charley Nicks
Storyteller