I am sure there was a casserole. That is what Mom always had for “company”, the special guests at our dinner table. I know I was sitting on the edge of my padded kitchen chair staring at him and trying so very hard to take in his every sumptuous word. We weren’t in the dining room; the yellow kitchen was cozier and more appropriate when only one extra guest was present. He had silver hair, but I couldn’t be sure how old he was. Age is useless and unimportant to young children. He looked like Mr. Rogers, I think, but I probably made that up as part of my story. I felt like the luckiest kid alive to have parents so cool that people like this man sat with me at dinner. He was an artist. The proper term was “artist in residence”: a uniquely-qualified person who traveled to different places and usually spent time in a local school system to teach and share their craft. We had several of them as our guests over the years- one was a weaver and worked her magic on a giant loom, I remember musicians of some kind but this particular gentleman had my heart: He was a storyteller.
Stories were woven into every aspect of my childhood. My Dad would read to me in his deep, rich voice and change his tone for each character. Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame- I couldn’t wait for bedtime. I pulled book after book down from the dark, walnut bookshelves in our family room- mesmerized by the colors of the spines and varied thicknesses needed to hold in all of those incredible words. I spread record albums out across the beige carpet and read the covers over and over and over while their musical stories played in the background. I spied on grown-up conversations at every single family gathering. Because grown-ups had the BEST STORIES. I never understood why I had to “go in the other room” when the real stuff was getting talked about. Any night I could sit crouched in a teeny ball on a stairway listening to the clink of wine glasses and forks on empty plates mixed into the laughter and the humorous and sometimes embarrassing words of grown-ups, well, that was the best kind of night for me. If a curse word was thrown in that was better than getting to stay up late to watch Dallas. Fuck, I loved words. I was fascinated with not just humanity, but how humans shared their truths, their imaginations, their details, their pain, their joy, their souls.
His name, the kind-Mr. Rogers- gentleman at my table, I can’t recall, but he could spin words together into something so beautiful and mystical I wanted to eat it. He had a power I wanted so very badly. He was my Dumbledore. I set to work making words my life: writing poetry, collecting writing from newspapers and National Geographic, reading like a voracious wolf (stay back, don’t get your hand in the way of my book, I’ll bite it right off), singing (because musical stories? holy hell), acting (the embodiment of words on a stage was the most freakish perfection for a girl like me). Writing was dancing, dancing was writing, I couldn’t really tell the difference anymore, so I was just Harold with her Purple Crayon scribbling my path all over my life.
I got a little lost on my purple path for awhile. That’s ok. Sometimes, to tell the best stories, you have to stop everything and just listen, forever. For 10,000 years until pencils start to grow out of your fingertips, and your lungs turn into a typewriter. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Inhale-exhale, inhale-exhale.
One of my stories was published yesterday on a major website for a few hours. I was a published writer!!! The dream! I was sharing my words, my kind of story- my truthful kind. But they messed with it. They changed my words without my permission, and it felt all skewed and stomach-pit-y and icy in my guts. So I asked them kindly to return it to me. I am a storyteller with a lot of honesty threaded into my tapestries. I see them in my head like a theatrical production of life, then I put them down and lovingly toss them, with my eyes closed, out to you, out to the world. People may take from them whatever they wish. That is both the gift and price of being a writer- we do not have permission to force people’s reactions. But nobody gets to rewrite them for you. Enough said.
We are all storytellers. It is, in my humble opinion, the only way to survive as humans. Cluster around the fire with our drums and wild hair and dirty, broken fingernails and woot and stamp our muddy feet in ecstasy as we hear who slay the dragon, who hurt who, who asked for forgiveness, who made love with a warrior, who made a deal with the devil and who embarked upon their journey of a lifetime with a tattered sailboat and a lot of hope.
I have a lot of hope in all of you, my loving storytellers.
Gather around. There is so much to say. xoxoxoxoxoxox
