Well, yesterday was potentially a landmark day. It was World Storytelling Day. And, not to be outdone by prose, today is World Poets Day.
We all enjoy hearing or reading stories. If you don't believe me, look around you during a lecture at school or during a sermon at church. Notice how some people are distracted or dozing. But let the speaker or preacher begin telling a story to illustrate his point, and everyone perks right up! That is a natural reaction we pick up even when we're just little kids.
I recall as a child begging our father, "Daddy, tell us a farm story." He wasn't in any wars, so he couldn't tell us war stories, but he had grown up on a farm and as a young adult had partnered with his father on their dairy farm, so he could tell us "farm stories." (No, that's not my father in the picture; he never smoked tobacco!)
Then there was story time in elementary school, when the teacher would read us a story, usually combining it with our rest period. (I never remember having nap time. We just rested our heads on our desks and listened to the teacher read a story, and it was usually too interesting to fall asleep during!)
And, of course, there were the stories we read in the old Dick-and-Jane readers. Dick, Jane, Sally, Spot, and Puff were the main characters. Stories held our interest and hid from us the fact that we actually were working, learning to read and articulate.
Then I discovered firsthand the pleasures of reading not for school work but for pure enjoyment. After school, when most other boys were goofing off while waiting for their buses, I was often in the library. And stories of history soon arrested my attention, and I've been their inmate ever since.
It gives me great pleasure watching my grandchildren get the story-reading bug. But my greatest pleasure has been when they come to me, hop onto my lap or snuggle beside me on the couch, and beg, "Tell us a story, Pappaw. Something about when you were a kid." They also enjoy stories about their parents when they were kids.
Reading stories makes one realize that you, too, have stories to tell. They can be told orally or in writing. As long as they are told.
Several years ago, one of my daughters gave me a framed picture of an old typewriter under which was this statement: "Write your own life story." It was her way of stimulating me to write Look Unto the Hills: Stories of Growing Up in Rural East Tennessee (available on Amazon).
Although I'm not a poet, I do enjoy poetry--at least some kinds. I never enjoyed in school at any level the poems that we were expected to analyze for deep, hidden meanings and symbols. I liked most the poets who told a story, especially if it was about common, "down-home" things and had a little humor to it.
An appreciation of poetry, like storytelling, began for me at home. Mother, especially, had a number of poems memorized from her high school days, and she recited them fairly often. I can still hear her voice reciting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Village Blacksmith."
"Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands.
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands,
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands."
Another was "In the Morning" by Paul Laurence Dunbar, which tells the story of a mother trying to wake her lazy son. I remember Mother's reciting lines from the poem when I was a little slow crawling from under warm covers when she had called me to get up.
"Ef you don't git up, you scamp,
Dey'll be trouble in dis camp!
T'ink I's gwine to let you sleep
W'ile I meks you boa'd an' keep?"
I have the five-volume Prose and Poetry series of literature textbooks Mother and Daddy used when they were in school. Published in the 1930s by The L.W. Singer Company, they were titled Prose and Poetry for Appreciation, ... of England, ... of America, ... for Enjoyment, and ... Adventures. And I still occasionally pull out one of the volumes to read some of Mothers favorite poems, and those have also become some of my favorites, too.
As was the case for music, I learned to appreciate poetry but never wrote any myself. But I'm still trying to tell my story in prose for whoever might care to hear or read it.
What about you? Are you telling your story? If not, why not? It's worth preserving.
You say you don't know what to say? Well, start at the beginning. "And where is that?" you ask.
"Home is where your story begins."
Comments