ABSTRACT
I grew up in an extended family where stories were a staple of our gatherings. The threads of narrative that found form and sustenance around our table shaped my early sense of who our family had been, who it was now and who it was likely to be. From these stories, an entire mythology developed about my grandfather and his friend in their travels across the United States in a Model T in the early 1900s and about their trials at farming in the Canadian West later in the 1920s. My father continued these stories and added others about the rural Alberta community of his youth. He also wove in details of relatives whom I had never seen and who lived in faraway places like Washington, Michigan and Florida.
