Father’s Day

I am backstage, about to tell stories onstage. A man with a name tag and a clipboard announces, “Ten minutes to showtime.”

I am tuning my guitar, hoping I won’t stink tonight.

This is what all performers think about before they go onstage. They say silent prayers that all go, more or less, the same way.

“Dear God, don’t let me suck.”

It’s easy to stink at storytelling because there is no school for such things, so you don’t know if you’re getting it right.

I am still unclear on how I started telling stories for a living. The only education I have in storytelling came from elderly men who wore Velcro shoes and wore their slacks up to their armpits.

I have always had a soft spot for old men. From childhood, I believed that I was an old man trapped inside a kid’s body. I never fit in with peers, and I never wanted to. This was only made worse by the fact that I was raised as a tee-totalling fundamentalist who was forbidden from touching NyQuil.

As a young man, I would find myself in a crowd of teenagers who were smoking cigarettes, sipping longnecks, far from parental eyes, and for some reason, nobody ever offered me any real chances at sinning.

I would have appreciated the opportunity, but they viewed me as different.

I was blacklisted from social situations because I was the old man of the group. During social scenarios, I would generally hang in the corner, drinking prune juice, adjusting my Velcro footwear, holding everyone’s car keys.

People called me “D.B.,” which was short for “Designated Baptist.”

Ah, but my truest friends were elderly men. What I liked about them most was that they had already gotten their petty teenageness out of the way. They were more interested in major sins. For example, Biloxi.

After my father died, I looked for anyone with white hair to pay attention to me. I just wanted someone to be proud of me. I wanted to piece together a father figure. When I found the right person, I would follow him around like a Labrador until he took me home.

There was Jim. Bless him. He has Alzheimer’s now. He was retired and had nothing to do but tell stories.

And there was Davey, the retired Auburn University professor. He chain-smoked Winstons and read Wordsworth. He would loan these books to me and encourage me to read them. He would ask me to summarize them.

I don’t know if you’ve ever read British Romantic poetry, but they use a lot of “heretofores” and “whithersoevers.”

In his ratty apartment, that old man taught a high-school dropout to appreciate literature.

Old men are not like boys. They don’t have big ambitions—if any. They’re past ambition, and they have only experience left. They are ready to integrate what they know about the world into the lives of people around them. And if you listen, they will teach you.

After all, old men have seen their mistakes get worse over time, and watched their qualities get better with age. They’ve lost those they care about, and discovered that success is crap.

Sometimes they are grumpy, sure. Sometimes their joints get stoved up. Sometimes they can’t help telling it like it is. But other times, they will say something so profound, so incredible, that you have to write it down.

“Five more minutes,” the man with the clipboard says.

I hurry to the bathroom one last time. When I am at the sink, there is an old man beside me. White hair, thick glasses.

He dries his hands with paper towels and says, “You ever heard of this storyteller guy, Sean Dietrich?”

I keep my head down. “No sir.”

“Me neither. My dang wife dragged me here tonight, I sure as hell didn’t wanna come. Hope this guy doesn’t stink.”

He tosses his paper towel into the garbage and leaves the bathroom. I could be wrong, but I believe he was wearing white Velcro shoes.

I sincerely hope I don’t let that old man down.