Tell it like it was
by Stephanie Piper
The button on the hotel room phone said "story line," which sounded benign enough until I figured out what it was. You press the button, and a recorded voice reads your child a story.
It's a new take on the electronic babysitter, and maybe it's preferable to another hour of "South Park" or the umpteenth "Barney" re-run. Let she who never parked her kids in front of the television cast the first stone.
Still, the canned stories weigh heavily on me. They seem to herald a day when people no longer push back their chairs from the table and fill another glass and say, I remember. They hint at a time when no one will sit on the edge of a child's bed and say, back when I was a little girl.
I fear the day when real people stop telling real stories. How will we learn about who we are and where we came from? How will we know about the blizzard of '47, or the time Uncle Curt swallowed the penny?
Back when I was a little girl, I used to ply my grandmother with cups of tea and draw out her sepia-toned past. She worked as a telephone operator when telephones were technology's cutting edge, and she met my grandfather over the long distance line in 1914. When she took the train to Hartford to meet him in person, she wore a white suit so he would recognize her. A month later, she wore the same white suit at her wedding. I never tired of that story, or the rise and fall of my grandmother's quiet voice. The blizzard saga was a perennial favorite, since it featured me as an infant, stranded with my parents and sister on Long Island in the worst storm of the century.
Another world-class storyteller was my great aunt Hattie, a former school principal and professional eccentric. She was ancient by the time I knew her, but her narrative skills never waned. She remembered every poem she had ever learned and alternated dramatic recitations with fierce tales of the New York street toughs who once tried to disrupt her classrooms. Suffice it to say that they did not try a second time. Confined to a nursing home for her final years, she entertained her companions with Shakespeare. She reeled off entire plays, a nurse told my mother, complete with stage directions.
What daytime drama could rival that?
The family stories I love share certain key traits. They grow richer with repetition. They need a human voice. And they do not depend on a point, a moral, or a happy ending. Sometimes, these stories simply hold up a mirror to life. They may not tell the whole truth, but they are always true. They tell us how the past looked, and how it sounded. They tell us what was different then, and what will never change.
In these uncertain times, we are told to prepare for any eventuality. We are urged to assemble an emergency kit of things we will need to survive: flashlights and kerosene heaters and propane cookers. But I wonder if they haven't omitted the most important item. We need to stockpile stories, stack them up in some cedar-lined mental closet. Only then will we be ready for long, silent nights when the single comfort we can count on is a human being in an armchair, leaning back and remembering a white suit, or snow drifts higher than the porch railing.
February 13, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 7
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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