What's your story?

Everyone has a story.  When I go to lunch with a friend, I hear stories.  Stories about what happened yesterday, about their lives, about what they should be doing, about what they tried to accomplish, about their aches and pains, about their grandchildren, about all sorts of things.

Hmm, I wonder what stories inanimate things would have.  "Before I was a table, I was a piece of wood.  But before that, I was part of a very tall tree and could see far away things."  If I asked about its youth, would that tree say, "I used to be small, just a sapling, but I kept extending my roots and growing and growing until I was almost higher than the trees around me.  There was this one tree that enjoyed calling me 'little tree,' but lightning hit it and left me the tallest tree in our part of the forest."

I did not grow up in a forest, but as the first child, I definitely was the tallest.  That is, until my brother (2-1/2 years younger) passed me and grew to over six feet tall.  Unlike that tree, though, my aim was not to be tall, but to expand my knowledge by reading books.  Hmm, book pages come from trees, don't they?  So now I have books and pages from trees on my wooden bookshelves.

Some of those books are textbooks from college and graduate school.  And they just keep accumulating, as I keep reading, even in retirement.  I like to learn.  I like to think about possibilities (and about talking trees).  What's your story?