You got any good stories? Who does anymore?

When I and my siblings and cousins were kids, we all had old ladies living with us to who were shirttail relatives. We never really questioned why mean old Aunt Katy, crafty old Aunt Marie and downright pixillated Aunt Mollie and our grandmother shuttled back and forth between our homes.

I’m still not up on all the details, which seep out from time to time. But the gist of it is my father and his two brothers didn’t have a pot to piss in when they were little. My grandparents didn’t have a place of their own until they were all well out of diapers.

Instead, they lived with relatives and friends. The widows living with us -- it was payback for keeping the family afloat.

My Uncle Tom let loose with a story I hadn’t heard before just last weekend, about his Uncle Dan. Dan was a practical joker with my uncles, and one time (well, at least one time) my uncles took it too far, stomping up Dan’s pride and joy, a small piece of land he turned into his pride and joy of a lawn.

Dan was pissed, and yelled at my uncles. After cooling off, much to their surprise, he gave them gifts. They each got a pair of roller skates -- his way of keeping them disinterested in his grass.

I loved the story -- and being a writer was a little miffed I didn’t hear it until now. Writers are that way. We want, need stories. It makes it easier to make up things.

This being the confessional age of Oprah, I guess it surprised me that I haven’t heard all the family tales. From one extreme to the other, I guess, either telling your innermost family secrets to the world on TV, or keeping amusing anecdotes from your childhood quiet until an otherwise uneventful Saturday night in May.

The story made me think, too, that Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes is pretty close to a lot of American experiences, from less than 40 years ago, and even today.

I mean I had a buddy when I was in high school who came from a family of five kids. They lived in a two-bedroom house and nobody seems to have turned out the worse for it. In fact my buddy has a nice job in banking out west now, and his brothers and sister all have families of their own.

Another buddy of mine came from a similar situation in Michigan’s UP. His home was heated by a wood burning stove.

And to think, lots of white people out where I live bitch about Mexicans (their generic term for anyone brown) who live in homes with more than one family.

Then again, out here in the burbs with the endless sameness of our subdivisions and plasma TVs I wonder if roots are just one of the things we’ve forgotten.

Sure it’s nice to have a degree of comfort. Does that have to make us bland? Does it have to rob us of our stories?

Maybe it’s TV and movies -- unless it’s hyperbolically dramatic, people feel their own tales aren’t worth telling. But our own tales are what give us identity.

Without them, we are just human strip malls.