Our stories....would we beg for it again?

The Boxers

by Cathy Smith Bowers

When my father, after twenty years, came home
to die, circling, circling, like an animal
we believed extinct, it was my crazy aunt
who took him in, who told later
how the taxi had dumped him
bleached and whimpering on her porch.
And she who had not lived with him
thought his sons and daughters cruel
not to come when he began to call our names.

He died, and soon after, a package in brown wrapping
arrived at my address. My sister, who did not
attend the funeral, kept urging me to open it
and I kept saying I would, soon. Every day
when I came home from work, there it was
sitting at my back door, the remnants
of my father's life—years in the mill
spinning and doffing, then drinking into morning
as he railed at the walls, the cotton
still clinging to his fists. Weeks had passed

when finally my sister and I, after two stiff bourbons,
began to rip the paper, slowly in strips
like archaeologists unclothing a mummy.
And all that was there were a few plaid flannels,
the jacket to a leisure suit, and a pair of boxers,

white and baggy, Rorschached in urine—a smaller size,
my sister said, than the way she remembered him.
Then she offered to drop the things at the Salvation Army
store she passed on her way home. In July

we went shopping for swim suits and I could
see her in the curtained stall across from mine.
She was pulling her slip over her head when I saw
she was wearing them, her thighs like the pale stems
of mushrooms emerging from the boxers' billowy
legs, whiter, softer now, washed clean. I still

can't say why my sister, that day in the Salvation
Army store, glanced up, as I've imagined,
to see if anyone was watching
before she slipped those boxers from the soiled heap
of our father's clothes. Nor why
I took so long to open that package, both wanting
and fearing whatever lay inside. Like a child
huddled by the campfire who cries out in terror
at the story someone just told
and, still weeping, begs for it again.

"The Boxers" by Cathy Smith Bowers, from The Love that Ended Yesterday in Texas. © Texas Tech University Press, 1992

This again from today's Writer's Almanac

Life is  strange. I recently was telling someone that I had just met,who does not know
me,really,nor do I know them something about my life. I was struck as I told a brief synopsis of a small part of the history of my life and that of my ancestors, by the fact that I could account some tangible content by memory as it was told to me or as I remember having witnessed parts of the story. But the weaving of the story with the interconnections of adjective,adverbs, the intonation of my voice was really my personal narrative, really reflecting my vision of how things were and how they may be. I realized that those ineffable nuanced tones made this story uniquely mine and although the facts may be the same for a few of us in my family that lived or heard the same experiences,we each have a unique story that is based on what have personally imbued into our lives,that the story has been colored by all that I have lived.
This poem reminds me of this sentiment of somehow knowing something about the act of creating the stories that make up my life."Like a child
huddled by the campfire who cries out in terror
at the story someone just told
and, still weeping, begs for it again."

Such stories make up the fabric of who we are,would we trade the identities that we so arduously chiseled from bare untested stone to become the human form of who we are. When all is said and done, would we give up even the painful stories that have created us of any reason ,would we not, "beg for it again", because that "it" in a large part has formed us into the us that we are.....