I’m pacing the floor, and my stomach is turning backflips. I shouldn’t be this nervous. I’ve stood up in front of a room full of people many times over the years. I shouldn’t be making this many trips to the men’s room, either. But I am.

Most of my “standup” experience has been done with notes. I teach Sunday School. I’ve given “tree talks” in small classrooms. I’ve given a few speeches before a full banquet hall. I’ve even filled the pulpit a few times on a Sunday when the preacher was out of town.

I’m not nervous about getting up in front of people. I’m nervous because this is not some speech with notes about a subject in which the crowd and I have a known common interest. I am about to give a talk about me. It’s really supposed to be about Georgia Bred, but it feels like it’s about me. I don’t know how to separate the two.

I don’t have notes. Hopefully, I don’t need notes on me. I should be familiar with the subject matter. If I do need notes for this talk, I’m in trouble. But because I don’t have notes, I’m almost certain I will mutter and stumble and sound like a complete idiot.

Here I go to the men’s room again.

While I’m pacing, I’m trying to channel my dad’s ability to embrace the moment. His knack for telling stories and tall yarns. He should be the one up front today, not me.

Dad wasn’t a big man in stature, but he was big in charm and personality. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people tell me how much they miss his stories and his tall tales.

“Your dad could tell a good one like nobody else,” they’d say.

I was probably a young teenager when I first recognized how he could capture a moment and how the stories just poured out of his brain with so much ease.

A group of us were attending the men’s retreat at Woodland Christian Camp in Temple, Georgia. There were probably 10 or 15 men and a few of us boys. When the preaching and singing was over on Friday evening, several hundred men would gather around a couple dozen campfires.

The woodland night looked like fireflies scattered beneath the pines among the campers and cabins. You could hear the murmur of conversations and good-hearted chuckles coming from all directions. Lawn chairs. Coffee mugs. Always some kid poking the fire with a stick. Hot orange ashes floating up and away into the dark canopy overhead. Glowing faces silhouetted against the night.

“When I was a boy,” Dad would say, “we plowed with mules. We had this one field that was on the other side of the Towaliga which made it tough to get the mules to the other side to work. We tried walking the mules through the deep water, but the mules would get so stubborn, sometimes we couldn’t get them to go. The water spooked them. We could walk them upstream about a quarter mile and cross in the shallows, but it took time, and it was steep.”

“One summer Papa got an idea about how we could get them across the river. He hollowed out four watermelon halves and laid them on the ground. It took a few weeks, but he trained those mules to step in those watermelons and stand still. And once they got used to it, we took them down to the river and put the watermelon halves in the water. Now, you might not believe this, but those mules stepped right in them watermelon halves. All we had to do was give ‘em a little shove and they floated across to the other side. Most amazing thing I ever saw.”

And he was off and running. The yarns went on for over an hour. As the evening wore on, there were guys from other campfires standing in rows around our campfire listening to him tell his stories.

I remember a church Christmas dinner one year. It was probably before the new Berea building was built in 1971. I say that because we held the dinner out at Camp Fortson in the dining hall. I can’t imagine why we would have gone there except that maybe the little fellowship hall in old Berea wouldn’t have been roomy enough for the crowd.

The entertainment for the evening was a fella from Griffin, I think, who came dressed in bibbed coveralls, a red bandana around his neck, and he was wearing a straw hat. Seems like he had freckles painted on his face. He talked like a hillbilly and told stories. Our bellies were hurting by the time he got finished that evening.

Stay with me.

A couple of weeks ago when I was visiting friends in Tennessee, Judy told me something about my dad that I had never heard before.

“One time, when we were visiting your folks, your daddy told stories at a dinner at the church. He dressed up in bibbed coveralls and wore an old straw hat. Clyde made him a huge pocket watch out of scraps. It had a chain on it and everything. Your daddy wore it dangling from his front pocket. He was so funny.”

In all my experiences, Dad had only told his stories around campfires and dinner tables. Maybe a small group of friends sitting out in the back yard under the shade trees. Or just him and me riding down the road in the truck. I never knew he was ever the featured program in front of a crowd anywhere.

Dad has been gone 13 years, now. I wish I remembered more of his stories. I told one to Marion the other night, one I had heard so many times that I wasn’t sure if it was even funny anymore. As a kid, I remember being embarrassed because this particular story included me, and I knew it was just a yarn built on real events that took on a life of fable and legend toward the end.

I told it to her half-heartedly, thinking she would probably think it was dumb. It surprised me that she really bought into it. She was hanging on every word. She was appalled at the details and then busted out laughing at the end so hard she slapped me on the shoulder.

That’s what a good storyteller does. He grabs you with things that are familiar. He tells you about things you know from your own experiences and then surprises you with an ending you weren’t expecting.

By now, my pacing is frantic. I sit down to eat a bite of lunch, but I can’t eat much. My knees are bouncing like drumsticks on a tom. Marion pushes on my knee with her hand and gives me the stare.

My stories are different than his. He could be humorous, but some of his stories had life lessons in them that have shaped who I am. I’m calling on that spirit now.

The time comes. James gets up to introduce me. I step up on stage.

Let the stories begin.