Ordinary Stories

Our lives travel a road of ordinary moments.

Growing up, my two younger brothers and I heard the stories of my father, a Catholic schoolboy from Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, a steel mill town along the Allegheny River. An only child and the grandson of Slovak and Austrian immigrants, he excelled at sports and academics, but the tales he most wanted to tell, the ones that made him laugh and laugh, were just about growing up - jumping in a dirty river, hitchhiking to sports practices, tricking the beloved sisters in their small Catholic school with all kinds of antics, breaking a window playing street ball, knocking out electricity on their block with a homemade robotic contraption.

My mother’s stories were tamer, but she too spoke of ordinary days - taking accordian lessons, visiting her German Baptist grandparents’ farm and watching her grandmother chop the head off a squawking chicken, then serve it for supper, going to see her Polish-only-speaking maternal grandmother, who served a smelly fish dinner on Christmas Eve and raised her children with a hand so strict my grandmother once caught the outhouse on fire because she was smoking.

Our southwestern Pennsylvania home ricocheted with more storytelling because of our parents’ professions.

My father, a college professor, and two of his colleagues began a years-long oral history project, interviewing coal miners, their wives, and other family members, about what life was like in the bustling coal mining patch towns. Patchwork Voices, they called it. With an interested, slightly distracted, adolescent ear, I heard about women bathing their coal black husbands once a week in a galvanized tub in the kitchen, community baseball teams and holiday parades, company stores and Catholic churches which sat at the center of each patch town, the fear that boomeranged through the same town when word spread of a mine explosion or collapse, the large metal lunch pails wives packed for sons and husbands to carry into the dark underground, filled with leftover meatloaf sandwiches, hard boiled eggs, maybe fruit or vegetables from prized gardens.

My mother, a home health nurse, traveled miles, often into these same coal patch towns, caring for the sick and homebound. She, too, would carry stories from her day, handing them to us with our dinner plates - the woman whose house was so filled with stuff that my mom had to tiptoe through it to provide her care, another who was blind but made the best lady locks (delicate pastry filled with white cream) and wrote a cookbook with all of her recipes.

I became a newspaper reporter after graduating from the Penn State University School of Journalism and took a job in Morgantown, West Virginia. The curvy mountain roads led me to story after story. I spent a day immersed in a working dairy farm, overwhelmed by the sounds and smells of the open air barn of jersey cows; I spent weeks working on a story about the neonatal intensive care unit at West Virginia University hospital, marveling over the miracle of those tiny humans kept alive by so many machines; I kept vigil outside negotiation rooms during a lengthy and violent nurses strike in Fairmont, West Virginia, trying to sympathize with the workers and the “scabs” who dared to cross the picket lines to care for patients. I felt strongly protective of women who had been abused by their husbands and were living in secret shelters, one who aborted her fourth child because of her husband’s violent temper. I grieved for a woman whose baby had encephalitis and died shortly after birth. I marveled at a family who lived without electricity or running water but whose rustic woodland home was cleaner than mine.

The bigger stories, the more important names, football coaches and pop singers, college presidents and police chiefs, didn’t resonate like the lives of the ordinary.

People survive a lot of stuff.

The sacred is in the details - the way the neonatal intensive care nurses touched those two-pound babies or the miner’s wives tucked food into those lunch pails. The way my great-grandmother served Sunday dinner to anyone who came to their farm that day, or the blind baker sent my mom home with a plate of pastries.

I left writing behind to create a few stories of my own when my husband and I adopted four children in ten years. The youngest is now 22, and I am 61. I am still drawn to personal interviews and oral histories. I crave the details in ordinary lives which, stacked together, create a template for holiness.

No matter how well we think we know someone, there is always a stray story beneath the surface. The anecdote to surviving the sufferings of this life lies in the ability to see the sacredness that touches a soul in the ordinary movements of the day.

How and why do people become who they become? How do they work, create, love, and maintain their faith when the brittle bits of life threaten to break the joyful ones?

This is what I’m willing to travel down a country road to find.

Stop by my website to see more writing. If you sign up for the newsletter, you can access a few free faith-based printables: www.bethcasteel.com.

I am honored to be a contributing writer to two books of faith, Crowned with Grace and Cloud of Witnesses. You can find those books, both projects of Write These Words/Praise Writers writethesewords.com, at:

https://store.faithandfamilypublications.com or at amazon.com