Life Stories

In 2013 I joined a writer’s guild called “Word and Image Guild” for the Hermitage community that met at McKendree Retirement Village where I was living at the time (for 2 years). Most were older people like me and many were working on their memoirs and thus many of our writing assignments were to write about assigned types of events in our lives at various ages. I’m putting the stories that I wrote for that group here as a growing collection that just might become a book one of these days.   🙂   More stories have been added since that initial start and many more are still to come!   But nowhere yet do I have as many interesting stories as you will find on my almost daily Blog – Retired in Costa Rica! Check it out and subscribe for email notifications of new posts!

The menu below has stories arranged in chronological order as they happened in my life,  not in the order written. Most will have the date I wrote it indicated somewhere along with when it happened. It was fun and of course I will add more! As I get older I seem to remember long ago things better than what happened this morning!   🙂

The feature photo at TOP  is me with my British friend Steve and young fellow-missionary  along with 2 other young missionaries and a young Dutch couple tourists all telling stories around the campfire on Christmas Eve 2000 at Bird Safari Camp that you can  read about with many others in Gambia Stories.  What seemed amazing to me was that after I read the Christmas Story from Luke 2, the Dutch girl said that she had not heard that since she was a child and someone then read it on Christmas Eve.   🙂      ~Charlie

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Sometimes reality is too complex. Stories give it form.”

– Jean Luc Godard

Life Stories MENU

* This starred (1 star) story is on ANOTHER PAGE of my website (like Family or His Spirit) but linked from here as part of my life stories. It will not appear in the top menu for this page but on its location page menu. The whole website is a collection of stories ultimately, and NON-LINKED stories listed above simply have not been prepared yet. It has turned out to be a really big job for a big website!   🙂

** Double star (2 stars) is similar to above note, this story is not on this page but in this case on my BLOG  menu, not on the pull-down menu here.  In one sense all of my blog posts are stories!   🙂

LETTERS: Mom saved most of the letters that I wrote her over the years and they tell a story too! All her saved mail was photographed and saved by years in my photo galleries under the places I lived in those years. They include all her mail but most is letters from me. They are linked to on Mom’s Page and also linked on the main page of my Journals web pages which is sort of another type of journal.  🙂

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My college friend Bob Duffer has started his life stories as Old Guys Tales with a website devoted just to the stories and they certainly parallel a lot of mine in that we are about the same age. You might find them interesting whether you know Bob or not. (Warning: They are Baptist Preacher Stories.)  🙂   I wonder if he will ever tell the story of how I “stole the bride” at his wedding by jumping into the driver’s seat of their get-a-way car when he got out to get his Dad’s credit card and I drove June around the block in downtown Dallas, TX?   🙂

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And when in The Gambia we had The Bantaba, “The Story-telling Place” and that link takes you to photos of several of them I experienced where Gambians tells stories and accomplish many other community activities.

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And I highly Recommend  https://storycorps.org/  to read others’ stories and record your own! I recorded mine in 2012 in Nashville. They will all be kept in the Library of Congress. Tell your story!

And you can hear my 40 minute story online in my own shaky voice from 2012 when I was 72 years old in Nashville, TN at:

https://archive.storycorps.org/interviews/mby009366/

Or see a written outline of it (by them) on My StoryCorps Page on this website which includes a photo of me and my interviewer, hers or someone’s outline of my life and of course the above link to the recording on “StoryCorps Archives” where you can find other peoples stories who have released them.

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. . .  this was a subsidiary of CNN producing cool video stories. Not sure if still in operation. Read about it on Wikipedia.

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“Stories are a communal currency of humanity.”

–Tahir Shah, in Arabian Nights

¡Pura Vida!

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