just a simple story

have you ever wondered how most of the stories we love are the simplest ones? ones we have heard so many times, yet every time we hear it again it just feels as though it were the first time? i guess a lot of people have thought about it, judging from the never-ending stream of narrative throeries. but somehow i think great stories are what they are because they can make you feel so comfortable--like the smell of newly washed linen, like the all-too-familiar bus ride to college, like the long-lost photo which has amazing time-machine like properties. you know them. yet you want to know more.
just today i heard such a story, which i'm sure will sound banal and inane and, frankly speaking, cliched in any other time or place. my mum told me and my brother this story of a little adventurous kitten and ball of wool. been-there-done-that you say? i thought the same thing. but somehow, as my mother went on with her tale of a little girl watching a kitten unravel a nearly-knit sweater, i could see my mother's curly haired 11 year old self fascinated by so "story-book"-like an act. i could see my grandmother and her friend chat incessantly, unaware of this minor wool-tragedy unfolding before their very eyes and the little girl gleefully sharing the kitten's sense of adventure. the house, the room, my grandmother's friend--i have never seen them. the cat has died its nine deaths, possibly in all the proverbial 14 generations. but yet, there's something that i know so intimately about the story. a recreation of a memory, a borrowed memory. a story which became a part of my mother's memory and then became mine. that's a really good story. that's a classic.