A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes it’s the words that give the picture meaning. Last year for Father’s Day, my sister got my dad started on StoryWorth, which is a subscription of sorts that sends the person (in this case my dad) a question each week that they then write an answer to. There are lots of different questions and you can add your own as well. Some of the ones my dad has answered are ‘How did your parents pick your name?’, ‘How different is life today compared with when you were a kid?’, and ‘Are you more like your mom or your dad?’
I feel like my dad was skeptical of this endeavor at first, and I understand.
I know how hard it can be to write a story each week. But for just about 52 weeks, he has done it, and it is an amazing collection of stories. Each week when my dad writes a response it gets e-mailed out to myself and my siblings. Reading those stories, I’ve learned lots of things about his life. And that’s where I think the words do matter. Some of his stories, I’m now connecting with old pictures that I’ve seen. Without those words, they’re just an old picture. Now with some of the stories behind them, we understand a little more about his life and how he got to where he is today.