Sold!

The first thing I did after signing the papers was to exhume St. Joseph. He's going to have his own little niche right under Jack's mezuzah.

When did I cave and send off for that St. Joseph statue to help me sell the house? August?

Sealed inside a ziploc bag, he came complete with instructions. Which I followed, including the part about burying him upside down. At least, inside the baggie, he wouldn’t get dirt up his nose. And I guess, since he’s plastic, there really isn’t a worry about all the blood rushing to his head. So. I said my prayer, made my promise to give him a place of honor in my new home, planted him head first, put the lawn divot back in place, and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Finally, some time in November, Jack told me to just start packing. We’d move one truckload at a time to Pennsylvania, and by the New Year, I’d be ready to leave the house partially furnished until it sold. A sensible plan. Especially since my calendar for the winter months has so much … um … flexibility, affording me ample time to pack.

St. Joe was hibernating. Everybody knows nobody buys houses during the holidays.

Midway between Thanksgiving and Christmas, my realtor called to say she had just received a cash offer for the house. It was a good offer. I signed the contract. No dickering, no appraisal, no inspections.

We closed this morning. Wham. Bam. When I came home from the title company, I let myself into somebody else’s house.

I got to meet and talk to the buyer yesterday. He’s a real estate investor, and, almost not wanting to know the answer, I asked him about his plans for the place. He told me it’s the sort of little house he grew up in, that it’s the sort of little house he feels good in, that it’s the sort of little house he wants to live in. My heart sang. It’s reasonable to think I’ve turned this sweet little place over to a good custodian.

I’ll be out of the ‘Burg by January 8. But Jack and I will be back shortly thereafter for an “Out with a Bang, not a Whimper” party at LibertyTown: Saturday, February 4, from 6:ish until we all fall down. Everybody’s invited.

I plan on getting a “What Snoo!” out this week. It’ll have party details and new contact info.

So.

Another body part of this elephant is hugged.

Personal Archives

If I could, I would write a poem about this process. This little guy is my Pome in 3-d.

One of the most difficult parts about moving is that you awaken old stories attached to all the stuff you haven’t handled in years. For this move, I was determined to pitch everything that doesn’t meet William Morris’s simple but lofty standard for deciding which possessions you should be sharing your space with: “Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” And during the first wave of packing and purging I felt proud of all the clothes and kitchen stuff, the bath and bed linens, the unused gadgets and hostess gifts I hauled off to Goodwill. I even took my cowboy boots. Which did fit once. And they’re the only cowboy boots I’ve ever owned. And for awhile I wore them every day … much to my daughter’s chagrin. And they still had some good wear in them. Just not on my feet.

It’s been hard, but not really painful getting rid of the plethora of glittery trash that I think might come in handy (meets Morris’s “useful” requirement) or enhance a piece of trash-art (“beautiful”)* someday. I know there’s more of that where it came from and that wherever I live in the United States, trash will never be in short supply.

But now I’m down to books and papers. And journals. My old appointment calendars. What good are they? Am I going to go back and re-read all those thousands of scribbled pages? No. Not all of them. But dipping into them this week, I paid a visit to my self of ten, fifteen, forty years ago.

It felt good to touch base with her — the bewildered 22-year-old, the strident young mother (Nobody’s going to stop me from breastfeeding in public!), the forty-year-old woman who was finally deciding to design her own life.

I found the manuscript of my third novel, written when I was thirty-two. I burned the manuscripts of my first two unpublished novels, because my 25-year-old and 27-year-old selves wrote them for the approval of my God, my mom, and my writing teachers. They embarrassed me. But this one, I’ve kept. Not that I entertain delusions that it’s publishable, but because it rings true to who I was all those years ago.

I found the first draft of a short story I don’t remember writing, but it is clearly my handwriting, clearly a marked up first draft, never revisited. I guess it did the job it needed to do.

Sorry, William Morris. I’m hanging on to this stuff. After I’m gone, my kids can have a bonfire with it (both useful and beautiful). But for now I want to keep the option of dropping in on my former selves from time to time.

Sound quality wasn't that much better before it got scratched up.

I don't remember a time in my life when I didn't know this song. I think I'm the only human being in the whole world who can say that.

Last summer, in the process of helping my mom organize her closets, we found three 78 rpm phonograph records, recorded in 1952, when I was two years old. We lived in Stamford, Texas, at the time. Mom and her friend Barbara decided they could write songs as good as the stuff playing on the drugstore juke box. Within a few months, they had a portfolio of eight or ten songs. Somewhere, probably in the piano bench, I still have handwritten sheet music for a couple of them. I know of three that were arranged and recorded and actually did play on jukeboxes around West Texas for awhile. I have two of those sides — “The Boy Next Door” and “My Pedrecito,” performed by Little Dedon and the Fox Four-Sevens. I’ve given my mom a lot of grief for hanging on to sh-t she doesn’t need. But this evening, listening to these tunes I cut my teeth on, I was glad she had decided not to jettison these little shreds of our personal history.

“My Pedrecito”

“The Boy Next Door”

(Hey. It’s all in the eye of the beholder)

Review — Dancing Granny … & other tales to boogie to

Eshu Bumpus and the Chakour Family tell, sing, play, and dance through a collection of folktales for kids, inner kids, and discriminating grownups.

I’ve just re-listened to Eshu Bumpus’s most recent recording, “Dancing Granny and Other Tales to Boogie to.” It’s not just stories. There’s music, too. This is a collection of four stories and several songs put together to get folks out of their chairs and up on the floor all dancing together. Music weaves its way into, around, through, and out the other end of the tales — vocal counterpoint and harmonies, accompanied by drums and other traditional instruments.

There are so many layers. So much going on. Softly, though. It’s not a rowdy album at all. In fact, I can’t think of anything I’d rather have playing in a car full of restless kids or during a bedtime cool down.

Eshu’s speaking voice is soft – like a blanket is soft. The stories are gentle ones, spiced with humor. The music – think of a happy marriage of African lullabies and cool jazz, exquisitely arranged and performed.

The stories include Dancing Granny, in which Anansi plays his trick one too many times and as a result, he and Granny are probably still dancing. In Animals Make a Waterhole, a diverse community learns about cooperation and the wisdom of elders. Lion on the Path is a story of how Tortoise and Hare quit playing tricks on each other and save each other from Lion. And I’m not sure about the title of the story about a brave little girl who saves herself by singing a song even the hyenas can’t resist.

I have a couple of complaints – No. They’re just quibbles. – about this CD.

One is the packaging and labeling. You can only get so much information on a single sleeve. There’s a front and a back. The front does it’s job: Tells you the title of the CD and who’s on it. The back side lists the credits and the eleven tracks. Some of the tracks have duplicate titles, most of the titles are in a language that isn’t English and isn’t translated. Besides translations of titles, I’d like a little more information about the artists than their names and urls. Which is hard to provide on a single sleeve.

The second quibble is that I only found one place where you can buy it: http://eshu.folktales.net/

I’d recommend this one for ages ranging from grownup (with a healthy inner child and good taste in music) down to four-year-olds. Think of all the children you love, and their parents, who could use some dancing, some stories, and some fantastic jazz to sweeten their lives.

Here’s a couple of minutes off the tail end of the title story, “Dancing Granny”:

Here’s part of the album blurb from Eshu’s website: “Dancing Granny is a collaboration between Eshu Bumpus and Mitch Chakour and his family. Mitch is a consummate musician and not only performs on this CD but did all the technical work in his studio. Mitch’s son Alex plays several instruments and his daughter Alecia lends her fabulous voice. Our goal is to get folks dancing across the generations. We hope parents will dance with children, teachers will dance with students and grandparents will dance with everyone!!”

And now for something completely different…

Being a storyteller is sort of like being an iceberg. Only a little teensy bit of you is visible to the casual observer. Most of what goes on in order to enable that teensy bit to be visible happens out of sight. Out of mind.

This is the first “oomph” of what I hope becomes an ongoing effort to help keep my fellow storytellers and our beloved artform a little more visible above the waterline. I’m writing a review!

I have to fight the idea that by reviewing the creative work of my peers I am guilty of hubris. Who made me the expert? On the other hand, I keep remembering the words of a friend who played and wrote for one of the most successful touring bands in Australia in 1970, the year I lived in Sydney. His name is Doug Rowe, and his band was The Flying Circus. Upon the release of their 3rd LP (remember vinyl?), he asked my flatmates and me to give it a listen and tell him — honestly — what we thought. We all tittered and blushed and said we’d be delighted to, but we weren’t pros. What did we know? He said, “You’re the folks who buy the albums, and if you don’t like the music it doesn’t matter what the pros think.”

Emboldened by those words, I proceed with my inaugural review of

1001 Years of 1001 Nights,
tales from Scheherazade retold by
Mary Grace Ketner

A couple of weeks ago I finally got to meet Mary Grace, after months of reading her comments on a storytellers’ listserve we both subscribe to, admiring the way she thinks and her way with the written word. The occasion that brought our paths together was the George West Storyfest, now in its 24^th year, held the first weekend in November, south of San Antonio in the town of … George West, Texas. To meet Mary Grace is to like her even more than you thought you might.

But just because you like a person doesn’t mean you’re going to be over the moon about their work. I was happy to do the storytellers’ swap with our CDs. I had seen a video of one of her school performances and knew from those how personable and polished she is. But live performance and recording are two different beasts.

Well, last week I cleared my brain for some focus on stories and listened to both of my Mary Grace Ketner CDs – her brand new one, 1001 Years of 1001 Nights, and her 2009 recording “Ghostly Gals & Spirited Women.”

Oh, how I love it when performers realize the importance of professional recording and editing! Sound quality isn’t something I think about much unless it’s bad. Or exceptionally rich and warm. These recordings are exceptionally rich and warm.* There’s nice art on the CD sleeves, too. I know sleeves leave a smaller footprint than digi-paks do, but I would have enjoyed that extra panel a digi-pak offers for a statement from the artist or some background information about how these programs were chosen.

1001 Years of 1001 Nights runs just over an hour. The common thread is, as you might have guessed, the story of Scheherazade (I have to look at that written out somewhere every time I try to type it). The first track lays the foundation – what compelled a gorgeous young woman to create a new story every night for almost three years. The capstone piece is a very complete, very satisfying telling of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, in which it is not so much stated as it is demonstrated who the real hero(ine) of this story is. “The Peddler of Swaffham” follows Ali Baba, and if you thought that was a story from the British Isles, you’re right. But before it was English, it was Arabian – “The Ruined Man Who Became Rich Through a Dream.” The program concludes with “The Tale of the Hunchback,” which also emigrated … to North America … and morphed into “Old Dry Fry.” Everybody knows Old Dry Fry, and nobody tells it better than Mary Grace, giving free rein to a Texas accent she came by honestly and knows how to use to its best advantage.

Lest anyone think Ketner chose these variants casually, have a listen to the first two and a half minutes of the first story on the CD:
mary grace schez

I’ll bring this review to a close with a quick statement about her first CD, “Ghostly Gals…” It’s like a Whitman Sampler of stories with colorful female characters – folk tales, fairy tales, local legends, scary, wistful, eerie, and one of them, The Condiment Basketball Game, is an outright hoot. Ketner tells the best La Llorona I’ve ever heard, and I count that story among the “regulars” in my own repertoire. Finally, Pretty Maid Ibronka, a Hungarian fairy tale, has all the enchantment of a dream – a dream you want desperately to wake up from.

I’d recommend these stories for grownups all the way down to very intelligent 10-year-olds.

Okay, so here’s how you order them: Go to http://www.mandalamusic.com/jazzartstore/music/cds.index.html#ghostly.gals
And before long you’ll be able to order them from CDBaby, too.
Here’s where you can find out more about Mary Grace: http://talesandlegends.net

*I’m sorry to say this clip probably won’t sound so rich and warm, because I smooshed a nice big .wav file into an .mp3, which is the audio equivalent of turning half and half into skim milk.

Eyeball to Eyeball…a Storytelling Primer

I received the following message from a school librarian I like and respect a lot. She has brought me to her schools a few times over the years to tell stories, and what I remember most about working with her is that whenever the story is being told, her face is just as lit up and alive as the kids’ are. She gets it about storytelling. Still. I guess putting the book down and going eyeball-to-eyeball with your audience can feel like a long scary leap. As I was writing my response, it started sounding like what I sound like in my brain when I’m in Blog Mode. So, thank you, K.D. in central Virginia for this quick beginner guide to…

Putting down the book:

Hi Megan!
I hope all is well with you.
I have a 1st grade teacher who has asked me to tell a story to her class. Read a story, no worries. Tell a story, email Megan.
Can you direct me somewhere that may help take away the terror?

Put the book down and everybody gets to invent their own personal dragon

And here’s what I wrote back:

Hi there!

You’ll do fine.

If it can be any story, I highly recommend Margaret Read MacDonald’s collection 20 Tellable Tales. She has written them out with suggested line breaks, pauses, and long beats. If you read them aloud the way they’re laid out on the page, you’ll sound like a pro. And the stories in this collection are really formulaic, which means once you have the formula, you know where in the story you are, so you don’t have to worry about memorizing (yuck) or leaving out a big hunk. And there all sorts of suggestions for places to invite the audience to join in…which we know first graders are always ready to do.

You know, it’s not cheating to tell a story you remember from when you were a kid. There’s nothing in the world wrong — and a whole lot that’s right — with keeping the old chestnuts alive — 3 Little Pigs, Red Riding Hood. Yeah, they might know how it ends (I’m sad to say that’s becoming rarer and rarer); but they haven’t yet experienced how you will get them there. And already knowing what’s going to happen in a story makes a kid feel smart. In first grade, everything is new, and if you tell them something they recognize, I believe they get a subliminal message to the effect that their knowledge base is starting to amount to something.

You don’t have to get dramatic. Or spo-o-o-o-o-ky. Or precious. Just give it to them straight. Good stories don’t need you to prop them up. And children don’t need to be around grownups whose voices change just because they’re with little people. (Creepy.)

If you can see in your imagination what’s going on in the story, you’ll be able to tell about it so the kids can see it in their imaginations, too. Think about that! All those unique imaginary universes being created simultaneously from the telling of one story. Anybody who thinks listening to a storyteller is passive entertainment, hasn’t paid attention to the faces of a tuned in audience.

Also keep in mind — 1st graders? They’re already in love with you. Whatever you do with them, as long as you’re having fun, they’ll think you’re the awesomest liberrian in the whole wide world.

Let me know how it goes.

megan

Accidentally Spot-on for 11/11/11

Last week I did a program for some genealogists and local historians here in Fredericksburg. The president of the group told me he was concerned about historical facts laying dormant in notebooks. He said everybody worked so hard to find their information and piece together how their information is connected to the grand sweep of history. “But after they dig it up, it just sits there, and it’s all so deadly dull!” He wanted me, in an hour and a half, to give them the formula for writing riveting history.

I’m no historian. But I used to be a librarian. I’m a storyteller. And a writer. And I know that history is as much Art as it is Scholarship. So here’s the pep talk I gave them:

In order for your findings to make sense, they have to have a context. In fiction, that’s the setting. In order for your facts to have meaning, they have to effect some change in the status quo. In fiction, that’s plot. In order for your facts to be remembered, they have to touch hearts and imaginations. In fiction, that’s where characters come in.

“But this isn’t fiction,” they protested. “This is history. Bits and pieces of history. Riddled with gaping holes.”

I figured it was time to quit lecturing and start storytelling. I told a true story based on my mother’s memories of being in high school in the early 1940′s.

High School on the Home Front — “Gold Star”

I told the story, and then I passed out the following annotated copy of the text, to get them to thinking about creative extrapolation and healthy psychological projections.

Here’s the story, interspersed with the story behind the story:

High School on the Home Front
“Gold Star” (annotated)

You knew where the families of the boys or men who enlisted lived. For every soldier a blue star hung in the front window. In those days you couldn’t walk anywhere in Edmond without seeing four or five blue stars in every block. Sometimes you’d see two or three stars in one window. More than one son fighting.

On many occasions the grownups remembered out loud. Mom didn’t give me this information; I overheard it while playing under the dining room table or hanging out in the hallway by the living room door when everybody thought I was asleep.

That was early in the war. And in just a matter of weeks, gold stars started showing up in place of blue ones.

This is pure extrapolation on my part. I asked my mom if it was true, and she, as if verifying the obvious, said, “Of course it is.”

My sister and brother-in-law ran the telegraph office there in town. Telegrams were the FedEx of the Forties. You knew a telegram was coming in when the little ticker tape machine crackled with Morse code and spit out a strip of paper with the message typed out in capital letters. That message lay in a loose tangle until Beryl or John or one of the office staff could glue it down on Western Union letterhead, cutting strips to fit the width of the paper. And then one of them had to hand deliver the message to the addressee.

These are my own memories. In 1955, my uncle’s office looked just as it had looked in the early ‘40s; telegrams were received and delivered just as they had been then.

You didn’t send a telegram unless you had something important to say. A fifteen word message cost thirty-five cents, so the language in telegrams was concise. Terse. Sometimes a telegram carried good news and excitement: “FIVE POUND TWIN GIRLS BORN JUNE 13 MOM AND BABIES FINE LOVE = JIM” “DEAR MAE ARRIVED IN US WILL BE HOME SOON TELL MOTHER SAME LOVE=BRADY” But in 1943, most telegrams meant bad news. The War Office couched their news in extra words: “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret . . .”

I went online to find out how much telegrams cost in 1943 and found these examples in the process.

It was the middle of April, 1943. I was walking home from school, when my brother-in-law pulled up beside me in the car and told me to hop in.

“I have a telegram I need you to deliver,” he said

Mom never told me the month. An online search revealed the date, location, and circumstances of this soldier’s death. She did tell me that my Uncle found her on the way home from school and picked her up so she could deliver the telegram. He had had polio as a young man and was confined to a wheelchair, so he couldn’t deliver telegrams to people’s doors.

My heart went into my throat. I had the grace not to speak my first thought: “Dear God, please, not somebody I know.” I am not proud to admit that was my first reaction whenever I saw a telegram. And then, guilt-stricken, I would phrase a prayer for the family who didn’t know yet that their hearts would soon be broken.

This is what would have gone on in my mind. Later, when my mother heard me tell this story, she said that as far as her thoughts and feelings went right then, I had nailed it.

I read the message and sighed with guilty relief. “The Secretary of War desires me to express his deep regret that your son Captain Russell Dougherty was killed in action on two April in the Solomon Islands. Letter follows.” I knew Russell by sight, but he was a few years older than I, and we were not friends. His death had no immediate effect on my life.

He graduated from Edmond High School several years before my mother did. Edmond was a small town. Everybody knew everybody else, but all my mother’s friends were close to her own age.

It seemed monstrous that I knew something so intimate and unspeakably sad, that I was about to knock on the door of a woman who did not know me and who, because of the message I carried, would never forget me. Would she collapse on the doorstep and need help getting back inside the house? Would she slam the door in my face, wishing she could kill the messenger?

Again, I’m walking a mile in my mother’s shoes.

John told me I needed to stay with her for as long as she wanted me there, as long as she needed a shoulder to cry on or an arm for support. He told me there was no hurry. He’d wait for as long as it took.

It’s something my uncle would have said. I don’t know whether or not he actually did say this.

He turned off Broadway onto Danforth, and I felt all the strength leave my legs – as if I had caught my brother-in-law’s paralysis. My mouth went dry even as I felt tears sting the corners of my eyes. I can’t do this, I thought. I stared at my hands and blinked hard.

Mom told me later that Mrs. Dougherty’s house was in a different part of town. This is the part of Edmond I can picture, and in this case it doesn’t seem worth it to me to search deeds and titles to find out exactly where her house was. Again, the emotions are what I think my own would be in this situation.

John pulled up at the curb and stopped the car. I took a deep breath and steeled myself. But as I looked up the walk at Mrs. Dougherty’s little white frame house, I let out a sigh of shame and relief. She knew. Already, somehow, she knew. This telegram was merely a formality. It would not be the means, I would not be the agent to break her heart. Already a gold star hung in the front room window.

After years of hearing that Mom had delivered this telegram, I heard her remember seeing the gold star already hanging in the window. “Oh yeah. She must have already found out from someone else. Why else would she have hung that gold star?”

Mrs. Dougherty met me on the front step, unsmiling but gentle. She took the telegram from me and said, “I’ve been expecting this. Thank you, my dear.” She turned, stepped back into the house, and quietly closed the door.

As I was writing this story, near the end, I called Mom and said, “How did Mrs. Dougherty react, anyway?” She had never mentioned that … until I asked.

Here’s what I grew up knowing:

1. The oldest elementary school in Edmond, Oklahoma, Russell Dougherty, is named in honor of the first graduate of Edmond High School to die in World War II.

2. Once, when we drove past the school, Mom told me she delivered the telegram from the War Department to Mrs. Dougherty.

3. My Uncle John ran the Western Union office for Edmond, and Mom worked her him after school.

4. Mom said when they drove up to Mrs. Dougherty’s house, a gold star had already replaced the blue star in her front window, so she somehow had already found out about her son’s death.

A well-chosen story is worth twenty erudite lectures. They got it. We did a writing exercise that convinced even the most self-censoring among them that they were indeed capable of evocative writing. And I left them with one short sermonette:

I said: “And you, here, now – Make it easier on the ones who come after you. Leave a record of your own history behind. Can you imagine how thrilled you’d be if you stumbled upon a sheet of paper that one of your great-grandparents or a long-departed distant cousin had written on? Letter, grocery list, personal essay. It doesn’t matter. Would you judge their writing or spelling or penmanship? No. You’d treasure everything about it, right? So do unto others…”

 A little Veterans’ Day admonition to keep re-membering.

Baby Elephants…Right Next Door

This sums it up about the boys on the block. The t-shirt reads "Rugby players eat their dead."

Our street has become host to the University of Mary Washington men’s rugby team. They and their girlfriends have commandeered three houses on Brompton Street. Mary Wash (as those of us in town lovingly refer to this esteemed institution of higher learning) does not allow fraternities. Officially. On campus. I live on Mary Wash’s “frat row.”

I know last night was Halloween. But it was also Monday. A weekday. And there are classes today.

The party started at 4:00 yesterday afternoon, next door. A drinking game. A shouting and raucous laughter game. Hoo hah! Hoo hah! Hoo hah! Sounding very tribal…or something. Til dark. And then they started handing out candy to the trick or treaters. Awwww. When they ran out of candy, a couple of them stumbled (I saw “fallin’ down drunk” in action) over to the 7-11 for a new supply of sweets.

And then when the trick or treaters went home, the party resumed.

I shouldn’t complain. I was a kid once. I didn’t party like this, but I would have if I hadn’t been afraid my mom would find out. The boys next door have given me their phone numbers, and the deal is I call them before I call the cops. It’s the deal the whole neighborhood has with all the college kids who live here. So far the arrangement has worked.

I’m getting curmudgeonly as I age. Last night I thoroughly resented groping my way in the dark to the refrigerator door to get the paper with the phone numbers, then groping to the phone, then making my call. All I had to say was, “Hi, Paul. It’s Megan. Next door.” “Okay, ma’am. Sorry ma’am. We’ll shut it down right now, ma’am.” And within 5 minutes all was calm next door.

They respond to the old folks’ complaints with immediate, almost servile compliance, and they repeat “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, sir sir sir sir, ma’am ma’am ma’am ma’am” just like you see bad actors in bad westerns pleading for mercy. They go from Strut to Grovel in a half-beat. Which tells me 1.) you don’t respect your neighbors and 2.) you have no self-respect, either.

Please, boys. I don’t want to be the grownup in your life. I want you to figure out for yourselves that 12:30 on Monday night is not the time for a drunken chorus of twenty rugby players to be serenading the neighborhood with Roy Orbison’s greatest hits.