Tell Me a Story

"In Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.”  

—C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

• • • • •

My grandmother had a black eye. She also had a tremendous bruise on the back of her leg, vaster and more technicolored than any I'd ever seen. She was sporting the injuries of a prizefighter after a street brawl, but there was no violent tale to tell—no sweat or glory or heroic story behind those black and blue welts. They were simply the evidence of an aging body—of the falls she has taken in recent weeks while trying to perform the mundane task of walking from one room to the next. My grandmother is 92 years old, so her failing health should have come as no surprise, but during the last month her decline was sudden and precipitous. Although she has begun to improve, she remains weak, and tired, and frustrated by her inability to perform basic tasks.

My grandmother, who once spent her Saturday nights swing dancing at the Hollywood Palladium to the live music of Benny Goodman, can hardly stand without help. She, who never left the house without every strand of her thick red tresses pinned perfectly in place, now struggles to lift her arm to brush the tangles from her thin white hair. She, whose graceful fingers once speed-typed scripts for Jack Benny at NBC studios, can hardly bend her crooked knuckles to sign her own name.

Her health and strength may rebound as they have done so many times in the past, but they may not. And as I visit her and try to help her in what small ways I can, I am constantly nagged by the realization that so much of her story is unknown to me, that there must be countless episodes of her life's adventure that  will go unremembered and untold.

Here is my grandmother, living right in my own town—even in the same house for a time—for all these years, and I have hardly begun to explore the pages of her history. I feel like that person who, having lived her whole life in New York City, is now about to leave it forever and is realizing she's never visited the Statue of Liberty, never seen the view from the top of the Empire State Building, never attended a Broadway show, never strolled through Central Park. It was always there, so I could do it anytime. And now time is nearly up. I have had this tremendous and enviable array of stories and memories close at hand for nearly two decades, and I have not availed myself of it. Her life spans nearly a century, but I could not recount more than a pitiful handful of the episodes that her long story comprises.

• • • • •

Realizing that the time I will have with my grandmother is limited, I started making a point of hearing at least one story from her every time I visit. As we chat, I simply ask a few questions, and then I sit back and listen as she turns to the colorful pages of her past. These hours with my grandmother have been some of the most rewarding of my life. In one short hour I was with her recently, scene after scene unfolded before my imagination.

She told me stories of family members whose names I'd never heard. I learned that her grandfather died in a coal mine collapse, and that her grandmother, who never remarried, spent the subsequent years cooking meals for the coal miners in order to support herself and her two young sons—Grandma's father and his brother, Charlie. 

She told me how her father was appointed by President Calvin Coolidge to be the postmaster of their small Illinois town, and how the subsequent postmaster was so incompetent that her father remained on the job to perform the other man's duties. She chuckled as she suddenly remembered a huge, friendly German postal carrier named Otto who delivered the mail on horseback and who knew everybody in town.

With a wry smile, Grandma recounted her first date. A high school senior had invited her, a lowly freshman, to the Fireman's Ball, and was she ever flattered! Knowing how much she loved to dance, her parents gladly gave her permission to go, and her mother immediately set to work sewing her a new dress for the occasion. At the ball, the high school coach—a young newlywed nicknamed "Hap" who had been a friend of Grandma's older brother—was cutting the rug with his pretty wife. As they spun around, they both lost their balance, stumbled, and fell right on top of Grandma and her date, knocking them to the floor where they all fell into fits of embarrassed laughter. Grandma laughed till the tears came as she remembered it.

And tears continued to trickle down her creased and freckled cheeks as she told me about the painful years of World War II when her brother, Rock, served on a munitions ship carrying explosives across the Atlantic from New York to England, always fearing attack by the Germans. Her voice quavered as she recalled how she never knew where her youngest brother, Ken, was during those years or whether he was still alive. She frequented the movie house, partly for distraction, partly to see if she could glimpse a familiar face—his face—in the news reels at the start of every show. She did not hear a word from Ken until he came home, and he would tell only one story from his time serving in the Marines: his unit had stormed the beaches at Guadalcanal, and as they neared land, he was certain that they were all going to die. As they ran together up the tropical sand, the men on either side of him were shot and killed, but somehow Ken survived. And that was all he could bring himself to tell her.
  
One hour with my grandmother was all it took to sit and relive all these scenes, and a half dozen more, from her colorful life. One hour. And this is just the beginning. I could have made a point of doing this countless times before, so why didn't I? Even at 92, my grandmother's mind is still lucid and her memories  vivid, so I am learning as much as I can in the time that we have left.

I know that every cinematic genre is represented in the sweeping screenplay of Grandma's life—action, comedy, adventure, tragedy, romance—and at this late hour, I am realizing how much of the plot is simply mystery—at least to me. Having casually walked in near the end of the show, I am now scrambling to find out how to stop and rewind to the better scenes before the screen fades and the credits roll.

• • • • •

In revisiting the the Little House series of books this year, I have been struck by the gift that Pa had for telling stories to his girls—stories about his own life and about his family. His daughter Laura committed those stories to memory and was able to put them in writing so that generations of readers can still enjoy and learn from them. What a gift. What a legacy.

I suspect that we as a culture are losing the art of handing down family stories. We bequeath physical objects—furniture and jewelry—to our posterity, but how often do we think of stories as a valuable part of our inheritance? I have only recently begun to think of stories in that way myself. But now that my grandmother's story is nearing its final chapters, I want to hang on—and hang on to—every word of her recollections. I want to remember them and bequeath them to my own children, precious heirlooms that cannot be broken but that can be easily lost.

As I've considered what questions I should be asking my grandmother, I have also been asking myself what family stories I hope to pass on to my own children and grandchildren. What form should these stories take if I want them to be remembered? What can I do to make these stories a joy to hear? A good story well told can express powerful truths that will stay with us far longer than any abstract proposition. Good stories give shape and color and texture to ideas. Good stories put flesh on words. And family stories can also help us to understand our own lives in the context of history.

My great-great grandmother raised two sons on her own by cooking meals for men who worked in the mine that had killed her husband. As a child, my grandfather was struck on the knuckles at school for speaking Norwegian instead of English. And years later, those same knuckles were lost entirely in a logging accident involving a chainsaw. My great uncle narrowly escaped being shot to death in the South Pacific. When my great-grandmother's dear friend fell ill and came from St. Louis to live with the family until she could recover, my great-grandfather had to seek special permission from the city council to have this woman stay with them—because she was black. These family memories help me to see my own experiences from a different perspective. Their lives helped shape the story of my own life. This is part of my inheritance; those stories are my stories.

So what if we made a point to not only read to our children but to share our own stories with them? What if our children grew up with a sense of their own history, of their unique place in the greater narrative arc of time? We have a history that bears repeating. In Scripture, the people of Israel were commanded to tell the story of their Exodus from Egypt to their children (Deut 4:9-10). The people were told to take care lest they forget. And if we are able to see our own lives in the context of history—as a brief chapter in a tale that stretches back to the first "Let there be"—then we may realize that the Exodus is also a part of our own story as much as it was part of theirs. And we forget it at our peril.

But forgetting is all too easy. Remembering will take work. It will take writing and repeating and re-telling. It will involve more talking around the table, more asking, more listening, more patience. In this tweet-riddled age, we rarely produce so much as a handwritten letter to save in a box of keepsakes, let alone a book of family history to pass on to our posterity. So, as I focus on collecting my grandmother's stories, I also need to think about how to collect my own stories and how to teach my children to do the same. We may need to spend some time learning the Calormene art of storytelling if our lives' narratives are going to amount to more than a disconnected series of status updates.

I want my sons to know that they are characters in a grand epic that includes all of us. I want my sons to learn and remember the best tales from their own lives, from their parents' lives, from their grandparents' lives. I want them to learn the stories from their great grandmother's life. But this means I would do well to learn them first, before her final chapter closes. It's time to look my grandmother in the eye—the one that was swollen and black and blue—and ask her to tell me a story.

The Birds and the Bees and the Flowers and the Trees

I have done some writing in the last month. Honest. As a matter of fact, I've written more than usual during the past five weeks. But unfortunately, all those words weren't coming together into any proper shape, which is why editing was taking far too long. I felt like I was sculpting jell-o. So rather than publish the formless, strawberry flavored blob I've been chiseling away at, I thought I'd be better off sharing something a bit more concrete to ponder instead.

Here, therefore, are 2,000 "words" from my photos this week:

This Little Light of Mine

Here we are in mid-January, and I haven't posted in over a month. And that last post was practically cheating, since I didn't write anything.

I'd like to think that I'll be writing more soon, but writing takes time, and free time is a commodity that seems to be running low around here of late. Writing—at least the kind that anyone would want to read—also requires a clear mind, but my sleep-deprived thoughts have been about as clear as the oily mud puddles in the alley behind my house.

Several times a day, I walk into a room and immediately forget what I came for. My children are learning to answer to any of five boy names. (At least I'm still sticking to names that belong to actual members of our family. That's pretty good, right?) The Christmas tree, until just a few days ago, was still standing fully decorated in our living room. And the dust. Let's just not talk about that.

My excuse is that I have a newborn who is taking up all my time. And I have four other children who take up all my time. We had Christmas preparations and Christmas celebrations and Christmas cleanup which took up all my time. And now that Christmas is over, I have graphic design projects that are taking up my time. I have groceries to buy and floors to sweep and thank you notes to write and books to read and Candyland to play and guests to feed and laundry to wash (oh boy, do I have laundry to wash), and all of it is taking up all my time. I could be wrong, but I suspect that this is why the old woman who lived in a shoe did not win a Pulitzer prize. She was too busy—changing diapers while talking on the phone to the insurance company and pausing to tell the six-year-old to quit using the piano keys as a Hot Wheels race track—to consider the metaphorical complexities inherent in domestic life and then string them together into graceful narrative arcs.

But then again, some women not only maintain blogs but sign book deals while knee deep in this kind of beautiful chaos. So I suppose my failure to write reveals more about my priorities than about my busy schedule. If you can call it a schedule.

Blogging has been pretty well near the bottom of my list of ways to use up all my time right now. But this may be a good thing. The fuller my life is, the less time I seem to have to talk about it. The best writing I have managed in the last couple of months has been the occasional uncreative Facebook status. Brilliant literature it is not. That kind of writing sheds about as much light as a dollar store glowstick the morning after a party.

Last week, as I was mentally reviewing shopping lists and to-do lists and hurrying home with a van load of groceries to my crying baby, I was inhabiting—both literally and metaphorically—the gray cloud of mist and mud being spat upon me by the tractor trailer I was following. I was thinking how colorless and drab life can be on days like this (poor me), how dull and monotonous, when I started listening to a CD of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I bathed my weary brain in her lucid prose, and began imagining how satisfying it would be to write as she does, capturing in precise phrases the glory and excess and teeming life hiding within an unassuming clod of earth.

There I was, a living clod of earth myself, and failing to be amazed by the mere fact of my own of my own existence. But gradually, as I listened, I found the dark cloud growing lighter. I found myself seeing through it. Or not seeing through it, but seeing it, seeing the thing itself:
Look at this grimy cloud!
Look at these living, mud-clumpy hills emerging from their snow shroud and rolling along beside the traffic.
Look at that tired barn leaning on the verge of collapse next to the highway, and see the story hiding within its weather-and-rain-silvered boards.

I am suddenly aware of the strange beauty on every side of me; I wonder how I could have missed seeing what I was seeing. How could I have forgotten that every particle of dust mingling with the rain and melting snow has a history of its own? Each, if it could speak, could tell me how it came from a distant volcano or an ancient glacier, from a maple leaf or from the palm of my hand. My hands—my own hands—are formed from dust, and are returning to dust even as I write this. I, too, am dust with a story. But I did not have to exist here any more than that muddy raindrop. How could I not be overwhelmed with gratitude and awe?

That is what this book does to me—and I haven't even finished it yet. It helps me to see. It shines a blazing light into places I'd never thought to look. I can't take it in all it once; I have to pause it and revel in words for a while. It's probably not safe to listen to while driving. Customers should be sent home from the bookstore with this volume packed inside a brown paper sack stamped with the warning, "Be safe. Don't Dillard and Drive." I need to give my full attention to what she's saying.

That is how I want to write.

Sitting there in my van, I wished I had the power to shape thoughts into the kind of words that could rip away the grey veil from those dreary clouds. I longed to shine my own verbal spotlight, to make everyone see the swirling magic, the millions of untold stories, contained in the spray of muddy water spattering our windshields. I wanted to uncap my highlighter and pull everyone's attention in glowing yellow lines connecting the dust in those hills with the dust gripping the steering wheels in the cars that flashed past—living dust, dust filled with borrowed breath. Dust with birthdays. Dust with dental records. Dust with college degrees and laugh lines and regrets. I wanted to wield my pen and make the pages shout, "Dust you are! Isn't it miraculous?"

But then I sighed and just kept driving, watching the wiper blades flick away the dingy film that clouded my view. I flipped the turn signal and absorbed the gritty rhythm of studded tires on wet blacktop.

Who am I kidding? Annie Dillard must have been born with a gift for writing. And she also has more than just a fleeting desire to commit her ideas to paper. She reads about writing. She writes about writing. She, no doubt, gets up early and stays up late just to write. I am sure that she edits and revises and edits again. Is that really what I want to do with my life right now?

Her life is not mine. I will never write like she does. I will never write about the same things that she does. I will never be a writer. Much as I admire her book, I occasionally get the feeling that something huge is missing from her prose. I realize that all her vivid descriptions, all of her startling metaphors, all her hours spent holding perfectly still until her cigarette burned down to her fingertips simply in order to observe the secretive behavior of muskrats could arise only from study, practice, and an essentially solitary life. Not a lonely life. Not a boring life. But a life full of lengthy meditation apart from the society of peanut-butter-smeared toddlers.

I would not trade my life for hers—Pulitzer and all. I would not trade Candyland with noisy preschoolers for rendezvous with quiet muskrats. At least not on most days. There is no less wonder in my sticky, spit-uppy existence. There is no less magic. There is merely less opportunity to write about it. For now, I will content myself with the few words I can post here on this neglected blog. I will shed what limited light I can.

Annie Dillard can carry her spotlight and I my dollar store glowstick.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

I have had little time to write these days, due, at least in part, to the daily mountains of laundry rising in impressive peaks and ranges across my bathroom floor. And as I near the end of this pregnancy, mountaineering has become an increasingly daunting task. My four—soon to be five—boys have a unique genius for staining multiple sets of clothing each day.

Although laundry occupies a significant part of every mother's week, it is nevertheless a subject given little dignity by the literary world. There is no shortage of (mostly sappy) poetry praising motherhood in the abstract, but not much is said about what mothers must actually do to keep the household running. Potty training must certainly have the potential to inspire earthy metaphors, and doing the dishes is a topic ripe for poetic analysis. Clearly, more mothers of toddlers should become poets. 

G.K. Chesterton once said that "the poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese." True enough. But they have also been mysteriously silent on the subject of laundry. In light of this sad omission, I thought I would share one of my favorite poems, by one of America's best-known poets. It is the only poem I know of on the topic of washing clothes, and it elevates that mundane task to something almost holy. Read it twice.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

by Richard Wilbur

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul   

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple   

As false dawn.

                     Outside the open window   

The morning air is all awash with angels.

    Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,   

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.   

Now they are rising together in calm swells   

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear   

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

    Now they are flying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving   

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden   

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there.

                                             The soul shrinks

    From all that it is about to remember,

From the punctual rape of every blessèd day,

And cries,

               “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,   

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

    Yet, as the sun acknowledges

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,   

The soul descends once more in bitter love   

To accept the waking body, saying now

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,   

    “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;   

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,   

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating   

Of dark habits,

                      keeping their difficult balance.”

From http://www.poetryfoundation.org: Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” from Collected Poems 1943-2004. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted with the permission of Harcourt, Inc. This material may not be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: Collected Poems, 1943-2004 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004)

News Flash

To make up to you for the length of my previous post, today I am only going to publish a brief announcement: Something I wrote is actually going to be in print. (And there was great rejoicing.) One of my blog posts, written about this time last year after a longish blogging hiatus, was just accepted for publication in Relief. And yes, I am pretty excited. I do enjoy writing here, but this news makes me think that the existence of this blog is somehow officially justified. Don't worry, though. I don't plan on quitting my day job.