TELLING STORIES

Our family, we were road trip warriors. As children ourselves and then as we had children of our own, we clocked countless hours on the interstate en route to one adventure or another, and that meant a lot of off-the-cuff entertaining. Sure, there was “slug bug” and the license plate game, but for the most part, spinning tires meant spinning tales, particularly one that was a twangy Texas twist on the Wizard of Oz.

Our Dorothy was Dakoda, a restless wanderer with a penchant for exploring, who one day found herself disoriented in the desert, and as day turned to dusk, she relied on her newfound friends and their quirks-turned-perks to help her home.

“I mean, we basically stole the storyline,” laughed Audrey. “A girl gets lost, meets a bizarre, slightly ‘off’ cast of characters, and kind of accumulates this motley crew along her adventure that ends up helping her out of her various jams. You know, they all seemed to have something ‘wrong’ with them, and that ends up being their gift. I guess it’s a lesson in acceptance and celebrating diversity, not judging a book by its cover, but we were certainly not thinking that deeply about it as we spun it, we just wanted the boys to settle down in the back seat.”

“Yes, I’m not sure we got a grand moral message across at the time,” Cheryl added with a laugh.
“They always wanted more drama and danger than we gave them in our happily-ever-after versions. For instance, Dakoda gets her braid all knotted up in a cactus, and our solution was to have a helpful hummingbird come untangle her. The boys thought the coyote should’ve just gnawed it off. And that’s raising boys in a nutshell.”

Our boys could probably still tell it, and who knows, you might even see it in print someday.