Scary Stories

​This is my last blog for August.  I know that time is relative because as I age time speeds up.  I feel like August 1st was just yesterday.  Sorry, I digress as one month slips into history, a month I will never have again, to yet another month, which is destined to follow the same path as August.
A few weeks ago we took our oldest grandson tent camping.  In the afternoon he swam in Ottawa Lake, and built a small river with several sand dams.  We set up camp, had dinner, then built the wood fire for the evening.  He warned me to not sit too close to the fire as he pulled his chair further back.
Once the fire was roaring he pulled his knees up to his chest and looked at me with walnut size dark eyes.  “Is it time for scary stories yet?”
“Yes.”
“Gram, you start.” 
Gram read from a book she found at the library about a haunted house.   We should have read the story ourselves before dragging it to our campsite.  It was a horrible book filled with violence, not scary, just violent.  We passed the torch.
Our grandson told a very good story about two transformer characters who saved their human friend from a scary, evil transformer.  He was very engaged, used a lot of hand and arm motion and modulated his voice for affect.  The boy is a born story teller.
My contribution was a story of an Egyptian mummy that came to life in search of his killer.  For emphasis I walked stiff legged with arms outstretched toward my grandson and shook his shoulders screaming I found the killer.  He squealed with joy and laughed.
This experience had two lessons for me.  First, human beings are hard wired to tell stories.  A five year old is capable of telling complex, compelling stories based in imagination.   Second, we like to be scared.  Stephen King discovered that many years ago and has had a successful writing career and had many movies based on his books.  I don’t understand why we like to be scared but we do.
May we each continue to imagine, write, repeat stories for all of our days, its part of what makes us human.