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.

Filed under: Uncategorized ]]> http://meganhicks.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/sold/feed/ 10 megan st. joe & so http://meganhicks.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/personal-archives/ http://meganhicks.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/personal-archives/#comments Fri, 09 Dec 2011 04:59:07 +0000 megan hicks http://meganhicks.wordpress.com/?p=1050 Continue reading →]]>

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.

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

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!!”

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.

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.)

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

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.

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.

‘Tis the season for spooky stories. I have a couple of new ones that I was aware of. I wrote them in anticipation of my Big Gig in Jonesborough earlier this month, and all spring and summer I practiced them on absolutely anybody who would humor me and sit still for 14 or 18 minutes. After a few dozen tellings, I feel as though they’re finally getting a little polish.

One story, a folktale, reached out unbidden and grabbed me this summer.

I was with a couple dozen teens – 14-16 year-olds. And being teens, they wanted to be terrified. Perfect! I got to run my two new stories past an especially receptive audience, and they were appropriately appalled. But when I was done, I had fifteen minutes left and no more scary stories in my hip pocket. Note to self: “With teens, if you start with scary, you stay with scary. If you don’t have enough scary to begin with, start with something else.” It was too late to take that advice, so I reached back for an old story whose bones I know well, even if I haven’t had much practice telling it: “La Llorona,” the weeping woman.

She inhabited her story that day, and every time I’ve told it since then she has been more and more present. The story has begun to teach me what my version of it is about.

I’ve heard it told as a cautionary tale about vanity and selfishness. A peasant version of Britney Spears (only latina) overreaches her station in life and successfully seduces a nobleman… who throws her over as soon as he gets a better offer. This blow to her ego pushes her over the edge and in a desperate attempt to hold on to her meal ticket she tosses her sleeping children into the river and then goes nuts and can’t stop wailing. The manly meal ticket, in turn, curses her for being shrill and insane and if you didn’t think he was a total a-hole before, you do by now.

Call me Goody Two Shoes, but that’s not a story I want to tell. Even when it taps me on the shoulder.

Same bones. Different story:

She’s an innocent alone in the world, and her lover is an innocent who is not so alone. He’s a child of privilege, sent away to the family ranch to learn some management skills and get the wild oats out of his system. He loves her and she loves him, and they both dearly love their little boys. But the day comes when he is called upon to fulfill his duties as a nobleman’s son, to take his place on the ancestral treadmill, to marry a woman of his station and beget legitimate heirs.

He doesn’t know how to tell his lover all this, so he tells her nothing until she finds out through the grapevine that he is making preparations to leave the ranch. She confronts him. He can’t avoid it any longer. He tells her it’s not his idea (all right, so he’s behaving cravenly), but his father insists that he go to the capital city and marry the woman the family has chosen to be the mother of his children. “I’m the mother of your children!” she says. “Why can’t you marry me?” He doesn’t want to hurt her with the cold reality that aristocrats don’t marry peasants, so he tries to think on his feet and come up with something that makes sense and doesn’t break her heart: “Well, but, see, it’s like this … the children we have now were born out of wedlock, and if we were to marry and have more children, they would be legitimate heirs, and there would be terrible family squabbles over who is entitled to what. It would be so… so messy. No. I have to go. But I’ll be back. I won’t forget you or our children.” And he means it. Because he does love them.

Broken-hearted and sick with grief, she returns to her home thinking, If only our boys weren’t born outside the bonds of holy matrimony… and that devolves into, If only there were no little illegitimate children standing in the way.

By the time she arrives home she is broken-hearted and mad with grief. She gives her babies to the river, which sweeps them under and away. And when she tells her lover their babies are gone and there is no long any reason they can’t be married… grief and the realization that his sweetheart has gone bonkers sends him off the deep end, too.

You don’t hear any more about him.

But La Llorona still weeps for her babies, still looks for them wherever rivers flow…

…and if you see her up ahead of you, walking along the river’s edge, weeping, so small and frail – don’t lay your hand on her shoulder to try to comfort her. Don’t let her see your face. Because then you’ll see what’s left of hers. In the dark sockets of her eyes you’ll see a flicker of light. Hope. Recognition. She’ll take you for one of her lost babies, and she will sigh, “Mijo. Ah, mijo.” With superhuman force she will draw you to her hollow breast, she will sigh, “My child!” She will kiss you. And once you’ve been kissed by the weeping woman, your mind will never be the same.

So we got two broken hearts and no human villains in my telling of this story. I guess the bad guy here is an unjust, self-perpetuating class system. And I have to ask myself if I’m doing that American thing of despoiling another culture’s treasures to make them fit in with my mid-century modrun decor. I guess I’ll have to find out the hard way. If you’re the one to enlighten me, I hope you do it with a sense of humor. And whether you do or not, I hope I have the grace to take it on the chin.
…….

That’s not what I sat down to blog about this morning. What I really sat down to blog about was a house concert I did earlier this month, where I went to tell spooky stories but I was the one who came away creeped out. I feel constrained about going into much detail – because I know I’m making judgments based on a two-hour visit. So I’ll cut it short and say whenever I enter a house where I see bare walls, not one book, and not one work of art, especially when that house is where children receive their schooling, it’s creepy.

———

(You can order the CD …signed, numbered, limited edition… of my two new original stories – “The Janitor’s Closet : : Occupied” by sending me an e-mail stating your intention to send me ten bucks. Include your mailing address. You’ll have my CD by the time I receive your check.)

The weekend was a blur. A lovely blur. But a blur.

I think I’ve pretty much recovered from my weekend in East Tennessee. My cheek muscles were sore from all that grinning. I’ve never been so hugged in all my life. And I’ve never had so much fun performing as I had at the 39^th Annual National Storytelling Festival.

I had intended to post phone photos on Facebook. In my down time. Between sets. When my mind would be a limpid pool. As it turned out, my mind was so limp(id) on Friday I forgot to charge my phone, and for most of Saturday and Sunday I just flat forgot my phone. Jack must have been a little bit preoccupied (insert ironic emoticon), too, because he ended the weekend with about half a dozen random shots. That’s not like him.

Thursday night we wandered all over town and soaked up the magic of still tents and party lights illuminating a sleeping town before we wandered over to the place where we usually camp out to see if my kids had arrived yet. (Dang! Not one family photo!) They had. As well as Jack’s sisters, who had decided months before I knew I’d be on the program that they wanted to find out what all the hoopla was about. As well as Bill and Lynn Ruehlmann, our Jo’bro tag team.

In spite of melatonin and caffeine avoidance, that night I could not turn my brain off and get to sleep. I told myself stories til the birds started singing and was grateful that at least I could keep myself entertained.

Friday’s schedule promised me two packed tents, because they had me going on first shot out of the box with Bil Lepp and second shot out of the box with Donald Davis. I don’t know how many people those tents hold, but I do know it was the biggest audience I’ve ever stood in front of.

(non sequitur alert!)

From the time I was in high school until my early twenties, I self-identified as a singer-songwriter. I was waiting to get discovered so that I could become a Rich and Famous singer-songwriter. While I was living in Sydney, in 1970, I did sort of get discovered by the lead guitarist-singer-songwriter of a band called Flying Circus. And he told me if I could come up with enough original material for an album (remember vinyl?), he’d arrange and produce it for me. Within six weeks, I had ten original songs, and about a month after that, we had ourselves an album. And then the Flying Circus boarded HMS Orsova, bound for Vancouver, BC and a year-long Canadian tour. My little album slept on tape for several months. Finally it was pressed and released and distributed across Australia and New Zealand, but there was no one on hand to promote it. By then, my visa had expired and I had returned to the U.S., where I knew absolutely no one in the music business.

For awhile after all that transpired, I pouted whenever I thought about that cluster of lousy timing.

What I wouldn’t admit to myself is that, secretly, I was relieved.

See…every time I’d stand up in front of an audience to perform, I’d get tongue-tied. My fingers trembled on the guitar strings. My voice quavered. I called it vibrato. It wasn’t. If I opened my eyes and looked at the audience, I’d forget what I was singing, so I kept my eyes closed. Forty years down the road, I look back and wonder what it was that drove me to torture myself like that. I guess it’s what drives all artists – the need to express one’s soul, the need to be heard.

Thank heaven for those creative writing classes I found shortly after I re-enrolled in college. I still enjoyed making music, but I didn’t feel compelled to do it anymore. Not as long as I was writing.

(and now we tie back in to the original thought)

What I’ve noticed about performing stories is that, while I may not be able to sleep the night before, it’s not fear or dread that’s keeping me awake. It’s excitement. And once I’m on-stage, my eyes are wide open and I feel like the luckiest human being in the world. I don’t know when I’ve had more fun than I had last Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

* * * * * * * * * *

"The Angel of Marye's Heights"

Clint Ross and Michael Aubrecht have asked me to write a snippet for the blog about their documentary “The Angel of Marye’s Heights.” It’ll serve as a coda for this post, too.

I tell this story about my first festival experience with my story, “What Was Civil About that War…”

A few years ago I was performing at a large regional festival where they asked if, for my solo set, I would do my Civil War story. (I only had one Civil War story then.) We all agreed that it’s a good, strong, uplifting piece. It’s also grim and intense. It’s about a bloodbath — the 1st Battle of Fredericksburg — that accomplished absolutely nothing to advance either the Confederate or the Union cause. And because it’s grim and intense, the program bore a caveat stating that it wasn’t appropriate for children under 12.

The title is not a question.

I was scheduled at the same time as three of the most beloved, high-profile humorists of the Storytelling Revival in America, and at the time I didn’t know which was the bigger challenge – making sure all thirty people scattered throughout that huge tent felt addressed and attended to, or pressing on through descriptions of death and dismemberment while waves of laughter washed across the grounds from the other tents.

After that, I saved “What Was Civil…” for school assemblies and adult library programs.

But this year, I had two compelling incentives for trying this story out again on a festival audience. 1.) Clint Ross’s documentary, “The Angel of Marye’s Heights,” was coming with me to the festival. Several dozen copies of it would be offered for sale in the Markeplace. This film is a beautiful tribute to one of the central characters in my story; I was privileged to have been included in it as one of the talking heads; I think it’s an important story that couldn’t be more meaningful and relevant in the context of today’s current events. The festival would provide an opportunity to use my story to help spread Clint’s. 2.) I was sharing the hour with Donald Davis. Translation: “You will have a packed tent.”

Both stories were warmly received. You can tell when the audience is With you, and as my tale unfolded, they were With me. Sunday, when I went to pick up my unsold merchandise, I found that “The Angel of Marye’s Heights” had sold out.

Pretty sweet, huh?

I got e-mail yesterday from someone I don’t know who just wanted to tell me she almost left when I started my program on Friday because she didn’t want to hear a story about the Civil War. Something, she said, kept her in her seat. She told me she was glad she stayed.

Messages like that, from people who don’t know you and don’t care whether or not you know them…messages like that are little pearls. I treasure them.

Up until about a month ago, I rented 96 square feet at LibertyTown Arts Workshop, where about 40 other artists hang out and make stuff. Inside the office, there’s a metal shelf with 40 cubbyholes for mail, intra-studio communicae, and no fewer than half a dozen solicitations annually from local and regional non-profits for donations of work. Now that I’m not there anymore, now that I no longer have a dog in this fight, I feel at liberty to hold forth about those letters.

Toward the end of my tenure at LibertyTown, I had quit reading past the second paragraph … the one where they tell me what a mensch I’ve been to have supported their efforts in the past with a donation for their auction / gift box / raffle / sale and how they’re certain they can count on my generosity again this… Crumple. Wad. Slam dunk.

I’ve grown cynical. I have received thank you notes informing me that my contributions to the raffle or silent auction raised less than 20% of their retail value. Call me small, call me petty, but for me, that amounts to a cordial insult. I’m thinking time spent folding letters and licking envelopes addressed to artists might be better spent educating the organization’s membership to the idea that a fund-raising auction isn’t Filene’s Basement. The object isn’t to provide you with bargains; the object is to make it more fun for you to part with your money. Repeat after me: “The one who leaves with the emptiest wallet wins!”

How ’bout this, all you development committee chairpersons: What if you support the artists (This scheme could be applied to shopkeepers and restaurateurs, too) from whom you solicit donations? What if some of your members were willing to sponsor a new work of art? The member would purchase a recent work from the artist – maybe you could work a deal for a discount, but please, not a deep discount – and donate the piece to the fund-raising event.

Lest I tar all artists with my curmudgeon’s brush here, let me assure my gentle readers that those of us for whom art is our livelihood do appreciate the opportunity to contribute our work to causes we believe in, because we rarely have money to give, and I think we all realize how important it is to give back to our communities. But, dang, sometimes we get weary with all the requests. Sometimes we feel as though people think since it appears we pull our art and our livings out of thin air, our work doesn’t cost us anything but time…as if time isn’t a pretty precious commodity in and of itself. And truth be told, when we do decide to donate work to your raffle, it’s not going to be our freshest, most exciting work. It’s going to be what didn’t sell in the Christmas rush. We do have standards, and we won’t donate anything we’re ashamed to sign. But it won’t be today’s crème de la crème.

There are probably holes in my Modest Proposal for a Shift in the Current Fundraising Paradigm. Please feel free to point them out to me.