Tell Me A Story

I don’t know how I got on the subject of my friend Kiko to John Fieck, who stayed in our home this weekend, but I next heard Miranda ask, “Who is Kiko? I never heard you mention him before.”

So the next thing I know, I am telling her of Kiko. It was fun trying to remember everything.

One of my Spanish students dared me to enter a chat room in Yahoo, not just any chat room, a Spanish chat room. I wasn’t really interested, but one day while waiting for Petra to come online, I thought I might try my conversational skills and finally tell that student I had done it. I chose a screen name and I was off. Turns out my conversational skills aren’t bad, but I did feel challenged in writing and thinking fast with the keyboard. I soon came to know a few people in the Barcelona area, and Kiko was one of them.

One thing led to another and we were fast friends.

After some months, and this was when the internet was very new to me, and for that matter, so were computers, Kiko sent me a file, a sound file of his voice. “How did you do that!?” I asked.  He told me how, but I was too shy to reciprocate, so, I asked my daughter Laura, who was tiny then, to say hello to Mr. Kiko. She did. But her voice was rather low and he could barely hear her.

The next day, he wrote a child’s story, about a little girl with a soft voice. He sent it to me. I was so surprised! I thought it was so dear and sweet.

I decided to give him a surprise back, I sent him the story back with illustrations, pencil drawings of mine.

That was all he needed to tell me to start a webpage.

I had NO idea how to begin at his suggestion. But he was patient and taught me a lot. We got an account at Geocities and created Cuentame un Cuento – Tell Me a Story.

That wasn’t all, he later wrote a story about a Kitten, a Kite, The Garden, and then I wrote one called the Umbrella. We later added to the site to allow friends to add their stories and poems. We also put Kiko’s composed music in midi format to the stories. Each story, my daughter Laura was the inspiration. It was a lot of fun.

As I was telling Miranda the whole story, it occurred to me that Geocities, which was bought out by Yahoo, had recently closed all their sites down, and therefore our hard work was long gone.

I have spent the day looking for any files that would allow me to revive the stories on my own site, and have managed to find all the files necessary for at least one. I will keep trying, as I feel a worthy project since Laura was the inspiration. Not much longer after the story page was created, Kiko got to meet his inspiration and illustrator face to face. He treated us to a whirlwind tour of places and events around Catalunya. Laura cherished her time with Mr. Kiko, and so did Miquel!

So please visit, Cuentame un Cuento, Tell me a Story