Storyteller

My favorite childhood storyteller: Grandpa
surrounded by his favorite listeners

Sometimes following Sunday dinner, Grandpa would go to the pie safe on the back porch and remove an old cigar box. He would dig through its treasures to find an item for a story. His cache included flint arrowheads, knives, and tomahawks he had picked up in the fields below the house. The box also contained rattles from several rattlesnakes he had killed over the years. That day Grandpa asked me to make a choice for the story. Of course I chose the largest set of rattles.

My sisters and I gathered around eager to hear Grandpa’s story. He told of a large timber rattler he encountered one summer day near a spring. Using a sharpshooter spade, he dug open the spring to fill a jug with its cold water to share with fellow harvesters. As he started walking from the spring, the snake struck but hit the shovel rather than Grandpa’s leg. Surprised and scared, he dropped his jug and tried to retreat, but there was neither space nor time.

Grandpa paused. We watched as he rolled up his sleeves and flexed the muscles of his arms. He said, “That old thing was as big around as my forearm and six feet long, and it was recoiling to strike again.” Grandpa’s arm moved quickly as if to strike us. Of course, we jumped; one sister screamed. He killed that huge serpent with the spade. “I threw the shovel like a spear,” he said, “and then cut off its head, and these.” He held up the rattles. I thrilled at the story and shivered when he shook the rattles, but I always felt safe walking around the fields and pastures with him. I knew Grandpa’s strong arms would keep me from harm.

© 2016 Denver An excerpt from "Milagro" prepared for reading at The Write Age Writers Workshop

Dance, Play, and Sing

Here's the story I wrote for my Storytelling Group. Sorry it's so long and that there are no pictures. Our topic...

A Meaningful Vacation


I didn’t think of it as a vacation, just a quick trip to Kansas City for a grandchild’s senior recital at the University of Missouri there. However, due to a large snowstorm in Denver the trip was prolonged and also took me to Mid-Missouri, into the heart of my family.

When I arrived at KCI that late afternoon, I headed directly to the Starbucks Coffee craving a cup. Waiting there were my ex-wife Myrna and a grandson Genaro. I got my fix and away we went to a nearby motel. We ate a light supper and then played cards.

In the morning Myrna told me she had been ill all night. When she felt up to it, we drove into Kansas to visit my youngest sister whom I had not seen for several years. Her husband had been extremely ill but was making a fine recovery although he was experiencing lingering effects. We had nice conversations and good food at their home. Back at the hotel Genaro and I went to the lobby for a light supper of chicken and noodles. Myrna asked us to bring her some if it was brothy. We enjoyed eating and did return with some food for Myrna who really enjoyed sipping at it. Again we played cards, a simple game called Cabin Fever, the game that has a strategy but not one that overpowers to the point one cannot have fun playing it. The conversations continued. I even won a game.

The next morning we shopped at the Country Club Plaza and then moved into the Westin Hotel at the Crown Center in downtown Kansas City, MO. There my daughter (Genaro’s mom) and three more of her children joined us. The kids stayed in the rooms watching TV while Myrna, Desma, and I roamed the Crown Center shopping area. In the late afternoon we went to Loose Park near the Plaza to join more of our family and friends at a picnic. The conversations there were very interesting, conversations with in-laws, college-attending grandchildren and their friends (a biologist, a musician, a Mexican American business major, a Viet Namese pre-med student, a culinary arts student in her internship, and a dancer). Then we drove to the old church where the ballet—the main reason for gathering in Kansas City—would be performed. We attended a pre-reception of snacks, cookies, and soft and hard drinks, met new folk, saw other friends of the family who had come for the event, and heard a live jazz combo. I really enjoyed listening and watching my very animated grandson Kalo play the stand up bass.

Then the main event of the evening, the performance of the ballet “To Some Transparent End,” a stage performance conceived by Kalo and his best friend Abbie, scored by Kalo, choreographed by Abbie—both students at the Kansas City Music and Dance Conservatory at UMKC. The work was a 35-minute program with eleven dancers, three singers, and six instruments. The setting was a city bus with riders coming and going and doing things people do while riding through the city. I watched with keen interest since I have been a bus rider for the past seventeen years. I recognized familiar bus characters with their body movements and attitudes, their appropriate and inappropriate actions. Of course there were no words except the Latin texts the singers provided, all related to the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, chapter four, the familiar “To everything there is a season.” Abbie told me that one requirement for the dancers was to take at least three rides on a city bus. The characters they observed and interpreted were crazy, thoughtful, high, confused, pointless, depressed, aggressive, intimidating, wooing, sexual, shy, freaked out…all these things recognizable in the action of the dance; even the surprising death at the very end of the show. I had seen all these things on Denver buses.

The applause was enthusiastic from the crowd of around 125 people. My grandson couldn’t hold back his smile although unlike the dancer Abbie he seemed not to know what to do with his hands. The two were happy. A music professor told my son Michael that Kalo and Abbie had really raised the bar for subsequent senior recitals at the Conservatory.

I was scheduled to leave the next day, but due to the snow my flight was cancelled. That’s why I ended up in Mid-MO for a few more days. There I played the part of pater familias, something I am supposed to enjoy but which never has attracted me. Oh well, we do what we have to do. I put up with it and did a good job. There was more music at a Jefferson City bar called The Mission. My eldest grandson, Evan, opened their Saturday evening RAP Fest with the National Anthem. He sang unaccompanied, ornamenting the melody as if he were on “The Voice.” The largely African American audience stood up as the song began and uttered sounds of approval at his improvisations. Then he sang a duet with a huge black man, Evan singing a nice melody and the other man rapping. The two of them had composed the quite affecting piece, “We’re All American.” Then I heard a lot more RAP. We left when two tall young men came in. My grandson recognized them as people he had arrested the month before in a neighboring town where he works on the police force. We left right away. On the way out of the bar though, I was hugged by three very large black men who just love my grandson.

While in Jefferson City I got to hang out with my daughter Desma, play lots more cards with grandkids, eat interesting meals with my ex-wife Myrna, and hear way too much noise. I started missing the very quiet people I live with in Denver.

For me, rich meanings arose from from the blending of generations, music, responsibility, love, and other complications, all things I could enjoy on my prolonged vacation in Missouri due to a turn in the weather and the luxury of my current retired status.

© 25 April 2016

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

Storytellers and Story Telling

On the vernal equinox Utes performed the Bear dance.
Bears came out of hibernation and Utes moved to their
spring camps where they danced.
The bear climbing up a tree is still used in that dance.
Surely the bear stories are told during that time.
The story was told in another art on a cliff in Shavano
Valley where petroglyphs capture the traditional lore.
One Ute shaman interprets the image above as the
bear coming from its lair.
Acrylic washes on paper by Phillp Hoyle

There were stories in my childhood told me by my parents. Mom told many of family, neighbors, marriages, births, and the places she lived. To these Dad added bible stories and some his dad’s colorful stories and sayings. Grandma Pink told of tales family and neighbors, Grandpa, of neighbors, snakes, and the farm—its history and its requirements.

I also heard stories from preachers. These stories served a different kind of function from my parents’ stories. Wilford F. Lown, Charles Cook, and some others used their stories to illustrate their meanings hoping thereby to actually communicate the values they held important to all members of our congregation. Jack McInnis years later told stories in his sermons as the content itself. Those I liked even more because they weren’t moralizing.

I heard stories from professors, most notably from James VanBuren who made the world of literature come alive like no other storyteller I had ever met. He dramatized texts in his reading of poetry or the Bible and brought life in so doing. Eventually I came to realize that telling stories was a skill! Of course, given who I am, I started reading about storytelling and finally also understood the use of "storyteller" as applied in criticism to writers of novels. (I’m a slow if thorough learner.) I practiced my approach mostly on children knowing that in such sessions what I said was also being heard by adults. I memorized stories, recalled old stories and retold them, and quite often made up new ones on the spot. Eventually I realized that all my answers to questions were turning into stories! Watch out if you ever engage me in conversation.

Five years ago this month I began attending a storytelling group. Now I lead that group, a gathering of elder storytellers who tell their own stories. The program is SAGE Telling Your Story at The GLBT Center of Colorado. AND you can read many of the stories told there by checking out our blog at sageoftherockies.blogspot.com

Denver, 2015