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"Daddy, tell me a story from when you were little!"

This is a common request at the breakfast table now. Actually, it usually goes like this:

"Daddy, tell me a story from when you were little and Uncle Lucas was little and you had a pond!"

Owen is far more interested in hearing the various episodes of my childhood than James was at his age. So I tell him stories of adventures, clubs, scrapes, heroics, and near-misses, and at the end of each tale he always insists "and ANOTHER one!"

Often, though, having heard the story of Martha and the bear, he'll follow up the end of a story about breaking a window with a soccer ball or tipping a canoe over by asking "and then did the bear come?" I think he's a little disappointed that Martha's bear doesn't play a larger role in my childhood as a whole.

I think he has grasped the idea that the versions of myself and his uncles that appear in these stories were, in fact, little children, and he is spellbound by the idea of having lots of brothers to wrestle with, a big backyard for football and tag, woods to the North and the South, trees to climb, ponds to swim in, and a hedgerow. He usually wants more stories than I can remember in a single sitting, so if anyone does remember any particularly good County House Road tales, Owen would be happy to hear them.

And James is interested, too. As a matter of fact, he was drawn into a story I was telling Owen the other day about when I was in Kindergarten and I was terribly upset because I couldn't find my backpack anywhere and my Mommy and Daddy were laughing at me instead of helping me to find it, and I couldn't go to school without my backpack and the bus was going to be here any minute! (It turned out it was on my back the whole time.) James nodded along and asked whether I felt bad that people were laughing at me even though I was looking for it very hard. He's sympathetic to the frustration of not being taken seriously when you take yourself VERY seriously.

Owen was just disappointed that the bear didn't show up.