Man, the Storyteller

Well, hello again. Dick Fothe here for known stories to make sense of it all. It is the month of May. I love the month of May. It's possible that May and October, because of the weather, are two of my favorite months out of the dozen. And in May you have flowers, you have spring rains. It really is a new life in a lot of ways. We have been together reading through chapters of the book known that Ruth and I wrote a couple years back, finding deep friendships in a shallow world as the subtitle. And at the heart of how we build friendships is story. Last time we were together we talked about God, the storyteller, and this time we want to talk about man, the storyteller, man in the generic sense, male and female. And I love the quote that you'll hear again in just a moment from chapter 6, which is from Ursula Caleguen, Ursula Caleguen, passed away a couple of years back, probably one of the premier sci-fi writers I'm told from the United States. But she wrote this about stories some years ago and it just captures me. The story from Rumpelstiltskin Tour in Peace is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man for the purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the will, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories. So let's hear chapter 6. Man, the storyteller, the story from Rumpelstiltskin Tour in Peace is one of the basic tools invented by the mind of man for the purpose of understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the will, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories, Ursula Caleguen. Tell me a story. Echoes in every culture on earth. Story inspires civilizations, passes truth from generation to generation, and connects us to each other. It has been the great teacher through all human history. Stories are powerful because they have mystery and beauty, laughter and tears, anger and poignancy that draws us to them. There hurt everywhere over campfires and around kitchen tables, in cars and on planes and always, always at family gatherings. Why the big emphasis on story you ask? Simple. Storytelling provides a pathway to knowledge and friendship. It is how we humans share our lives with others. Studies show that children by the age of two begin to create and tell their own stories. In the telling, they explain their worlds and learn about the worlds of others. In some cases, that's how they learn to manage their worlds. It is intuitive and natural. We're built for it. Tales told by the old to the young have passed down family lore through the centuries. According to Jeremy Tsou, in Scientific American, storytelling is a human universal and common themes appear in tales throughout history and all over the world. The best stories, those retold through generations and translated into other languages, do more than simply present a believable picture. These tales captivate their audience, whose emotions can be inextricably tied to those of the story's characters. No one in the last hundred years, in my view, did that better than Alex Haley in his seminal work roots. It swept us away as a TV miniseries in 1977 and a remake aired on the History Channel in the spring of 2016. A career US Coast Guardsman, Haley had been fascinated as a child by his family history, told on the front porch of his grandmother's Tennessee home. When he would visit in the summers, she told of the furthest back person in their family, a boy named Kintay, who had been kidnapped as a youth and brought to Annapolis, Maryland to be sold. He was simply called the African. After many years of searching, Haley located a tribe he thought might be his people near the Gambier River in Africa. He traveled to the village of Jufur, where the Grio, the tribal historian, lived. Haley spoke at that moment as the two of them sat on low stools. The musicians had softly begun playing choir and ballaphone, and the Grio aged seventy-three began speaking the Kintay clan's ancestral oral history. It came rolling from his mouth across the next hours. 17th and 18th century Kintay lineage details. It was as if some ancient scroll were printed indelibly within the Grio's brain. Then he got to the part that Haley had heard so many times before at his grandmother's feet on that old Tennessee porch. About that time the King's soldiers came, the eldest of these four sons Kuntay, when he had about sixteen rains, went away from his village to chop wood to make a drum, and was never seen again. Overwhelmed, Haley told the Grio that Kuntay was his ancestor. The villagers began to dance, and young mothers ran up to thrust babies into his arms for blessing, and Haley couldn't stop himself from weeping. Let me tell you something. I am a man, but I remember the sob surging up from my feet, flinging up my hands and bawling as I had not done since I was a baby. If you really knew the Odyssey, a powerful story going for generations, of us millions of black Americans, if you really knew how we came in the seeds of our forefathers, captured, driven, beaten, inspected, bought, branded, chained in foul ships, if you really knew, you needed weeping. In Haley's recounting the Grio was pivotal in that moment. Grio's are people gifted to carry the history of people in their heads and hearts. Such storytellers have been central figures in society for thousands of years. Storytelling was popular because before writing was developed, the success of communication was measured largely by how much of it was remembered by the audience. They couldn't just go write it down. So a high value was placed on techniques that helped people remember things like the rhythm of a song, the rhyme of a poem, or the engagingness of a story. In a world without books or the internet, the storyteller was a mobile news anchorman. He traveled from place to place bringing the latest accounts of what was going on in this town or that. Sometimes he put the stories to song and they called him a minstrel, or troubadour. Clarissa Pincola Estes, with great humor, captured it. Modern storytellers are the descendants of immense and ancient community of holy people, troubadours, bars, grios, cantadores, canters, traveling poets, bums, hags, and crazy people. And inflection and emotion. But, spoken or written, story itself did not get lost. Screenwriter Randall Wallace, whose credits include the screenplays for We Were Soldiers, Secretariat, and the story of his ancestor William Wallace in Braveheart, keynoteed the 2011 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC. He spoke about the impact of story in recounting his life as a boy in rural Tennessee. When he was battling asthma to the point of not being able to sleep, his grandmother would hold him close all night and rock him in her old rocking chair. Sitting in the audience I was touched when I heard him say she would rock and sing and tell me stories of her childhood, along with stories from the Bible. At my age, I could not tell the difference. So let me just interrupt the reading, my reading of chapter, for just a moment, we're in the present moment now, and just reflect on what Randall Wallace recounted about his grandma. When he said she told me stories of her childhood and Bible stories and at my age, you couldn't tell the difference. You know, when you talk to an older person these days, it's not always true, but many times it's true, that intertwined in their story because of the things they have come through, there are elements of faith. It's just how it is. Some years ago, when we lived in Falls, Church, Virginia, Ruth, who likes to thrift, came back from the thrift shop with a book, and we often, before we go to sleep, we'll lay in bed at night and read, and whenever she says, this is good writing, whatever the book is, I'll read it. Whatever the book is, because I like good writing. One of my favorite writers was the book she brought home. I didn't had not met him till that night, and his name is Rick Bragg, former Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The New York Times, but an Alabama-born guy. He didn't grow up with money, single mom, drunken father, in and out of the house, if you will, but when he was a reporter for The New York Times, and he's now Professor of Journalism at University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, I believe. He wrote a book about his mother, called All Over But The Shouting, and he tells the story as a New York Times writer of being sent to Alabama when on Palm Sunday, 1994, a church was hit by a tornado. Twenty people died, including six children, and this is how he writes it and how people reflected on it in their stories. I found them troubled by more than grief. You do not die in church in Northeastern Alabama. You do not die under the eye of God, under his hand in his house. You cannot. Later, when I asked Mama what people were saying, how they made sense of it, she just sat there with not much to say. Others I asked wouldn't look me in the face. I guess what I sensed was not anger but doubt. And he goes on in the book to detail the days around that time and chatting with some of the folks. And this is what he says, I ran into Sam Goss on my way to the car. Everyone knows Sam too. He runs the filling station and believes in heaven the same way he believes that walking in the Cusa River will get him wet. He smoked a cigarette, cried some and talked about glory, capital G. It's hard not to question God in this, he said, but they say there ain't no tears in heaven. We're the ones left to hurt. You see, God took them because He knew they were ready to go. He just given all the rest of us a second chance. Rick Bragg goes on to say, I don't know for sure if anyone in that little town of 5,000 or so ever shook their fist at God. I don't know for sure how many felt their faith slip away from them in the dark nights after that awful thing. But I doubt it is many. Life can be hard here without some faith. I remember what Vera Stewart, Piedmont's 70 year old mayor told me when I called her about the tragedy. Piedmont, she reminded me, has two doctors offices and 20 churches. As long as we have our faith, we are strong as our faith. Miss Stewart said, because no matter how dark it is, if I have faith, I have a song in the night. Back to our chapter. Like creeks tumbling into rivers, stories feed our lives. And what variety isop's fables make a practical point. Fairy tales take us to other worlds. Murder mysteries challenge our brains. Romance novels recall our youthful days and all of us learn from stories. Whether we learn best by seeing, listening or doing storytelling speaks to all three types of learners. And how children respond, being in the room when children are hearing a story is a special kind of experience. Whatever the kind of tale children want to know one thing when they hear the words, the end. And that is, is that story true? Because true stories are the best, aren't they? True to life anecdotes reveal a real touchable human being. The snapshots can be garden variety or extraordinary, but they freeze frame moments in a person's life that have made them who they are. It can be an old uncle who describes in halting detail the battle of the bulls in World War II where he came close to freezing to death. Surrounded by the enemy, he never thought he would see the age of 20. Or it can be the Apostle Paul telling of his face to face with Jesus on the Damascus road, blinded by the light. He is in limbo for three days. With past certainty shaken in his future unsure, he's transformed from religious jailer to spiritual liberator. His life whipsaws 180 degrees in 72 hours, and because he tells the story, we are blessed 2000 years down the road. In later life he wrote friends in a town called Philippi in northern Greece offering his own snapshot of a changed life. If anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more. Circumcised on the eighth day of the people of Israel of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the law of Pharisee, as to zeal a persecutor of the church, as to righteousness under the law blameless. But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. We owe the storyteller from oral historians of great repute to the great hand who kept track of the family tree in her big Bible, the story gets passed on. They tell us what people's lives were like then so we can know better who we are now. Broadway and Hollywood have always known that to be true. No company in recent years has captured that truth better than Pixar animation studios, a company focused on computer generated animation features to the delight of young and older like who have spent fanciful hours watching everything from toy story to finding Nemo to my favorite up. When author Brené Brown visited Pixar some years ago, the sign on the wall of Pixar's story corner caught her eye. Story is the big picture, story is process, story is research. With that template in mind, it is now our turn. Each of us has a story. That narrative is the foundation for every relationship. When I speak about my own early years, I am back in 1947 British colonial India. I'm writing a cold and steam driven narrow gauge train called the Blue Mountain Express up into the tea plantations of the southern mountains to go to boarding school. The picture has rainbow colors and smells of sweat and cow dung and tea on the bush. It has become one of the lenses through which I see the world. God story is a lens like that. It presents a totally different view of life and to a lesser extent your own story lens does that. When you tell your story it changes the way the listener sees the world. Your story is an original and when you tell it the door to a possible friendship swings open. Another person can walk through that door into your world then you walk through that person's story into theirs. Once upon a time you were alone. Once upon a time you sensed there was more. Once upon a time you made a decision to tell and hear a story and it changed everything. In a world inundated by data information where is the narrative that transcends it all? In a world of snippets and snapshots where are the themes that tie it all together? Stories do not just inform us, they form us, they put sinew and muscle on skeletal ideas and the bones live. You have a story to tell. What memories do you pull up? What adventures do you retell? What times do you relive? What is the lens through which you see life? Why should I tell my story you ask? Because the telling and the hearing of your story brings understanding and that is the pathway to friendship. Telling your story gives friendship a chance. Without your story friendship has no chance at all. That's true. Without your story friendship has no chance at all. I just said that twice because I think it's important. One of the great things, fun things for me about writing this book with Ruth is the fact that I wrote it with Ruth. Now she is a person of many fewer words than I. I'm a guy who finds out what he's thinking even if he speaks. And she's a person who actually thinks before she speaks. So she can say four lines that would take me four pages to say. In this next little section of chapter six, she shares her thoughts, part of her story. Here we go. Did you grow up hearing stories about people you admired? Not storybook characters, but real people with true stories? If you were hearing about people in your own family, the stories carried import far beyond the spoken words. In some mysterious way, you became connected to someone who was part of your heritage. As you listened, you learned some of the triumphs and pitfalls of their journeys, discovered their beliefs and identified some family traits. Really, you found out more about yourself. And you were actually learning how to piece together the material that would be the fabric of your own story. When I sit on a little block wall of my raised vegetable garden, dig my hands into the rich soil and tug at the weeds that grow faster than my tomatoes, I think about my granddad. The stories he told and the way he lived his life have impacted me. He was a farmer all of his years, first in his native state of Indiana, then a wheat farmer on the Canadian prairies, and finally a peach rancher in California's San Joaquin Valley. For seven years, I lived just down the path from my grandparents' house in Modesto, and later I spent some summers there. That's where I really got to know them. I loved Granddad's farming stories. He told of Indiana cornfields so vast and level and height that it looked like a giant floor stretching to the horizon. And I was fascinated when I heard about the huge challenges he faced as a homesteader in Canada. Winters so cold that his mustache would freeze to the ice crystals on his face, and the blade of an axe could break while chopping wood. While he spoke, his philosophy of life came through. Simply put, you did what you had to do. Granddad's faith was just a fact. His trust in God was built on the solid experience of a lifetime. He was eager to tell his grandchildren's stories of times when the odds were against him, but God was for him. I came to believe that prayer was an integral part of life. It was not only something you did when life was overwhelming you, but you also expressed gratitude for his provisions at the dinner table, and always at the end of your day. Some of his prayers involved high drama and the recollection of stories about them still inspires me. You can imagine what a move to Virgin Canadian Prairie might entail. My grandparents took all their household goods, four horses, a cow, two mules, Granddad's English that are hunting dog, and some farm machinery on the train. The livestock was in a freight car. During the journey, there was a train collision, and several cars were pushed off the track and overturned. The car with Granddad's stock remained upright and intact. He always gave God the credit for protecting that train car. The other prayer that stuck with me had to do with Granddad's second wheat crop in Canada. While out walking in his fields that were ready for harvest, he saw an angry looking crowd in the distance that would likely bring hail. He needed the money from the sale of the wheat to pay his bills and provide for his family during the winter, so he asked God to spare his crop. The hail storm passed over his acreage without doing any damage, and he was able to provide seed wheat for the spring season to his neighbors who had lost their crops. It seemed to me from these stories that if you rely on God, you could handle almost anything that came your way. A close second to reliance on God was Granddad's ability to rely on himself in most situations. Life hadn't been easy for him. His father died when he was three. When his mother remarried five years later, he couldn't get along with his stepdad. At eight years of age, he made the big decision to leave their home and move in with his grandparents who lived in the same town. When Granddad showed up, his grandparents were in their mid-50s with 12 children of their own. The youngest still at home. In such a large household, it was inevitable that things did not always please him. His one complaint that I remember him mentioning was that he had to eat leftovers in the kitchen after the adults had eaten. That may have been a common practice back then, but it didn't set well with Granddad. He promised himself that when he had children and grandchildren of his own, they would be served their meals before the adults. He kept that promise. We always ate first. Hard work was something Granddad learned at an early age. I love the story he told about moving a herd of cows through the streets of their town when he was only nine years old. To me, it didn't matter that he lost control of the herd, and as he told it, cows went everywhere. He gave it his best, and that was what mattered. As he grew, his grandfather taught him carpentry skills, and together they built a barn with a beam and post-frame work held together by wooden pegs. A homesteader, Granddad would need all the experience he had gained during those years with his grandfather. When he and Grandma arrived in Canada in the spring of 1906, they found their claim was unbroken prairie as far as they could see. The Dominion land policy required that they build a house and clear a certain amount of land so they could plant a crop. Shelter had to be built for the farm animals, a fire guard plowed, a vegetable garden planted, game hunted to supplement the food supply, and a clean water supply found. The demands must have seemed overwhelming, especially with the constant threat of drought, wildfires, hail storms, and invading grasshoppers. But with God's help and hard work, they persevered, and this became their home for 13 years. The fact that an uncle and his family had become homesteaders on the Canadian prairie before them must have helped. And the fact that they had traveled together with Grandma's sister and husband and child must have helped. They weren't doing this alone. They would be friends among friends facing the unknown together. Now I wish I had asked Granddad more questions and learn more about his life. I wish I had told him how much I admired him. Perhaps you can relate when you think of those who helped shape your life. As a child, I dreamed of growing up and living on a farm just like Grandad's. Of course, I didn't realize that farming was one of the most difficult and time-consuming jobs in the world. So thankfully, the closest I've come to living that dream is having a backyard garden that I've squeezed into nearly every place we've lived. If you ask Dick, I believe he will agree that some of that self-sufficient spirit and the willingness to tackle difficult projects has been passed down to me. At times, I must seem persistent against all odds. You might call it stubbornness. He probably thinks that if I've made up my mind to do something, he might as well give in. And I think he's right. Did Granddad know what he was teaching me when he shared his stories, illustrating for me how he lived his life? Did he know I was listening and watching? Did he know that his words and actions were drawing me toward his values and what he thought was important? I don't know. What I do know is that he absolutely affected how I wanted to live my life. And I'm grateful. You know, it's interesting when Ruth says what I do know is that he absolutely affected how I wanted to live my life. And I'm grateful. I see her grandfather in her. Of course, I just met her Granddad when we started courting in the early 1960s. But here was a hard-working man. Then in his 80s, if I'm correct, who just worked hard every day and had chickens and farmed his farm and did the hard things, if you will, that make life work for others. He had a hero that he used on the prairies of Saskatchewan, Canada, back around the turn of the last century. That hero sits in our back garden here in Colorado. It's rusty now, but if that hero could talk about her Granddad, I believe it would have some stories to tell. I see in Ruth the focus, the hard work, the connection to the earth, the good earth, that when she puts her hands in the earth, she says, it makes her feel connected to God. I see that virtually every week. So, man the storyteller, what Ruth tells you about her Granddad's impact on her life, that's a true thing. That's it for now. Hope you get a chance to subscribe to the podcast on the platform in which you're listening now. We look forward to catching you next time. Until then, this is May. Enjoy it, because summer's coming. Bye-bye.