Education and Storytelling

Once in a Lifetime

Here is the story I told today at the LGBT storytellers gathering. Think of it as somewhere between true confessions and entertainment--some kind of art!

“Opportunity knocks,” we’re told in adage and advertising. “This could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for you.”

I’ve grown to hate advertising, to resent Madison Avenue’s influence in hyping sales of clothing, stockings, cars, trips, meds, and Presidential campaigns. This change in American life got underway with terrifying seriousness during the 1940s and has never quit. I was born in 1947, surely my first once-in-a-lifetime experience. But eventually I came to see that everything that happens is singular. Any event of a life is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. For example, although one may go to worship week after week, the service is different if only because of how the worshipper experiences it. Surely the sermons are different even though preachers know they really have only three sermons. A few ministers work hard to keep them interesting.

But to a story! It occurred in the 1950s back when catalogues were still big time. My parents didn’t get them, but my grandparents who lived on a farm did. At around age 8 I discovered at the farm a new catalogue that had a very large toy selection, a kind of 50s version of Toys ‘R Us®. I was fascinated and marked in it all the toys I wanted for Christmas. Later my grandfather was perusing the catalogue and found my marks. He added them up and was amazed and amused to find that their cost totaled nearly $1,000. (In those days my dad’s salary was probably around $6,000. The sum made a good story for the family but one I didn’t hear about for several years. The catalogue went the way of all catalogues, meaning to the outhouse where I saw it later as it was recycled in what I suppose today would be called low purposing. Perhaps I mentioned seeing the catalogue there and then heard the story. I don’t know if this story of my childhood glee and greed changed me in any way, but I do later recall a Christmas when I got exactly what I wanted but didn’t expect to get, a Fort Apache and a knock-off Lincoln Log set. I was elated and played so many years with those gifts I failed to ask again for anything specific for Christmas. Still I got gifts and learned how to say thank you for gifts I didn’t appreciate.

Somehow I came to disdain the influence of fad making and advertising to the point I avoided purchasing anything faddish. Still do. I think my big change came one summer when I was directing a residential camp for kids going into fifth and sixth grades. That year I came across a group of children comparing the designer labels on their clothing—a first experience of this kind I ever observed among Kansas youngsters. I felt like leaving that work that afternoon, angry that parents and society were stealing childhood away from the children. A few years later David Elkind wrote a book, The Hurried Child (1981), a social/psychological study of cultural change and its effect on children. The book made a splash with reviews, interviews and some discussion, but made little impact on child rearing and American society. The power had already been handed over to Madison Avenue.

I still don’t go with the fads, even the thirty-years-ago fad of storytelling groups is still with us! I read and appreciated their literature, but when I attended one, the stories really had nothing vitally related to the lives of the tellers, or at least that’s how I perceived them. Thus I failed to join such groups then. But these days I am ever so happy to be in this group of storytellers in which we sell nothing faddish, nothing marketable, and tell stories of our own experience, ideals, and values. I like that our sessions seem like a revival of ancient gatherings of elders around a campfire to tell and sometimes evaluate the good old days and speak of how events shaped them and their tribe.

© 30 November 2015