Telling Tales

Once upon a time, I hung out with Rumpelstiltskin, Rapunzel, and various inventions of the aptly named Brothers Grimm. A vast underground stream of shared stories accompanied me through childhood, dense with ogres, princes and frogs. There were the terrifying Old Testament tales filled with lust and violence that my maternal grandmother Anna told me at bedtime to insure that sleep would not visit. There were the remote parables of the Gospel that were not for people like us. Many of the characters in these stories set in Palestine wore sandals much like the ones I coveted in the shop windows on 8th street when I was in high school. There were the ancestral stories of my paternal grandmother Theresa, going to work right off the boat polishing silver at Tiffany’s, and her husband arriving from Budapest with the name Wilhelm but having to change it to Ludwig because someone else at his workplace was already named Wilhelm Rosenberg. There was the saga of my father and his ten siblings growing up in a tenement apartment on Second Avenue over the family dry goods store and the many names Grandma Theresa would go through before arriving at the culprit if someone had done something unthinkable like lick the whipped cream from the top of a torte off an unwashed finger. Out of this deep well came personal narratives and dreams, the old crone arising out of the darkness as I made my way to the bathroom during the night, me crouching on the wall-to-wall in fear of her. This is one way to think about storytelling.

Photo by Cederic Vandenberghe on Unsplash

These are stories with more or less fixed content. We know about huffing and puffing. We know about how Cinderella lost her glass slipper and about that time David slew Goliath. But there is another sense of storytelling that concerns the constant plot line that loops around inside my brain. I can feel it bobbing and weaving from morning until night between worry and regret, between scraps of memory and grocery list items. In meditation, it permeates the thinking surface not claimed by my body or my feeling life. When I am aware that my feet are on the floor, or that I am sad, just plain sad, I’m not storytelling. I’m registering the present. It is peaceful here in this place that is what it is and doesn’t dwell on the past or crave the future. It’s a place like Eden where I’m alone with myself, naked and unafraid. All the rest, as they say, is commentary. But you know how it is. Commentary is not a solitaire. It works on call and response. It depends on a reader. This raises an interesting question for me. Perhaps you ask this question as well. How and when does all that noise in your head become music? How is storytelling transformed into art.

A friend suggested that the stories inside our heads, which can sometimes plague us and keep us from recognizing the present for the only friend we have, become art when they are let out of their reptile cages and shared. Then they surf the waves of human experience on their way to the ocean of narrative healing. Our son’s girlfriend, who is known as oma, German for grandma, posted a video of my 19-month old great-granddaughter running all over the house looking for her, shouting “oma, oma.” She said that she had no idea that watching the baby calling for her would bring her such joy. And miraculously the baby’s calling out reached me and lifted me out of my self-preoccupation for a heartbeat. Look, it said. New life. New language. New connection. That’s what stories can do. And they don’t have to be panoramic. Sometimes, a snapshot will suffice. Yesterday, we walked past a turkey farm with a family of birds, ignorant of seasonal feasts, pecking at the ground and making those funny turkey noises. The tom had a turquoise head, a red wattle, and a very black body. His mate was a dove gray and I wondered about them and what their life was like in the Sierra foothills in winter. The turkeys were presumably not considering yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Only humans tell tales and I may really have been wondering about myself. Part of moving to a new place is being innocent of the folklore, the backstory. Being instead tuned to the frequency of the IRT, a whole dark world of file clerks and drunks underground. Filled also with the clapboard Colonials in Stockbridge, fringed this time of year with icicles and tasteful white lights. Touched even over a short period of months by the lakes in Minnesota and the big river dividing the country into east of the Mississippi and west of the Mississippi. But where am I now? I am, I think, an emigré writer far from home.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.