Tuesday, October 24, 2017

The Almost-Lost Art


A friend online recently called me “quite the raconteur.”  At first I had to look it up to make sure it wasn’t an insult.  Then I realized it is the compliment that I have striven for all my life.  I think it is important for people to develop their human potential to become useful & interesting people.  I was thinking this way before writer/speaker Matthew Kelly was saying that “God wants us to be the very best version of ourselves.”  So I guess I feel validated in my intentions.

A raconteur is a person who is skilled at the art of telling interesting stories.  Perhaps it was hard-wired into my personality, but I know for sure that I grew up at the feet of absolute Masters in story-telling.  I also recognized that in order to find life more interesting sometimes all you have to do is change your perspective.  As one of the country singers twanged out, “Sometimes you’re the windshield; sometimes you’re the bug!”  The windshield and the bug can experience the same conditions or event and come away with a completely different take on it.  It is up to the story teller to help you find the glorious hidden within the folds of the ordinary.

It was my own perception growing up that Sunday afternoons could be dreadfully boring at our house.  My father truly wanted to just rest.  And frankly, We the People, did not!  When he built our house it was someone’s idea to put a large bay window in the living room that gave you a bird’s eye view of the street and driveway.  I almost felt badly for him when one of the family Storytellers would pull in the driveway – He knew his nap had just been definitively cancelled.  Usually, he would call out something that could have been 50% profanity; and 50% a prayer of desperation and my mother would say, “What?!”  The reply:  “My uncle just pulled in the driveway.”  The coffee pot would immediately be queued-up for the visit from my great uncle, the world traveler.

His stories had color, zeal, mischief, excitement.  They had almost as much intrigue in them as Robert Duvall’s character in “Second Hand Lions.”  And that is a big compliment.  I imagine his deceased first wife Emily must have been initially intrigued with him and his tales… and then perhaps she got to the point where she said things like, “All right, just cut to the chase.”  Years of marriage sometimes wears the veneer of politeness off – so then, you just to with your tales to visit relatives.

Frankly, when Uncle Vince met his second wife and “he got religion” I was a bit worried.  I liked the new great aunt most certainly.  But I was afraid that some of his story telling ability would be hampered by a set of standards that seemed to be unnecessarily tagged onto the title of “religious.”  I was, in fact, delightfully put at ease when he broadened his story repertoire beyond tales of the far past, to tales that included recent trips to shrines and religious sites.  You can get a lot of fun stories just being around people anywhere – but take it over The Pond to a foreign country and it can only get better. 

In reality, you could put “religion” into a man, but sometimes you can’t kick-out the pre-existing tweaked sense of humor.  I remember the strange color of pale and rolling of the eyes that my mother displayed every time he told his Ashtabula joke.  Even though Ashtabula is a small town in Pennsylvania, I believe, he saw the opportunity for creating a folk tale of a traveler who stayed at a farmer’s house.  The only place where he could sleep was with the farmer’s daughter.  The farmer’s daughter’s name was Beulah.  The traveler was allowed to sleep with her as long as he turned his ash-to-Beulah.  As kids we roared at that joke.  Now as an adult, I recognize the mischievous spirit in which it was delivered so I don’t think it counts as a profanity which is a sin.  It’s just, well, as my friend Joan would say, “naughty.”

If I had children of my own, the setting for some of the stories I would tell them would be the Polkabration Festival held at Ocean Beach in Connecticut back in the day.  My parents, my brother and I, would pack into the family station wagon and “It” would begin even as we backed out of the driveway.  I called “shotgun” because I needed a bit of air coming from the car vent.  My mother had a natural antipathy to anything that resembled a “draft” so she sat in the back with my brother…. Which was just fine with me …. Maybe if SHE drew the line in the middle of the back seat he would respect it.  He never did with my line.  I’m just sayin. 

Mom:  “Did everyone go to the bathroom before we got in the car?” (as we backed out of the driveway).

<insert my father’s exasperated sigh here.>  (as we pulled back in the driveway again).

Resuming our backward travel out of the driveway, we begin again.  We turn into the small grocerette around the corner from our neighborhood.  I can tell you that if Mom goes in, you are coming out with nothing in your pocket.  If DAD goes in and you tag along, you can put the squeeze on him for a piece of penny candy.

Dad:  “I’m just going to run in to get the paper.”

Resuming our travel after the grocerette, he turns on the radio.  Ah, country music.

Mom:  “Do we have to have the radio on?  Could we have a little communication?”

Dad:  “What the he!!! Is there to communicate about?”  (the interchange has the flavor of some of the scenes in the iconic movie:  “The Christmas Story,” sans the Red Rider bb gun.)

He turns it down low so only he and I can hear it.  I suspect this is why I turned out musically inclined, and my brother who sat in the back seat did not.  Students in some of the classes I have taught know that I maintain Country Music is foundational in learning to “hear” harmonies in music.  There’s a lot of depth and emotion in it.  And the old ballads are yet another art form of how to tell a story PLUS do music simultaneously – could it be any better than that?!

We are now eight minutes away from our own driveway, at most. 

Dad:  (to mom) “Did you pack my bathing suit?”

Mom:  “No.  We are all wearing ours.  You were supposed to bring your own bathing suit.”

Dad:  “I can’t wear my bathing suit under pants because they …” (well, too much information.)

We turn around and go back home to retrieve dad’s bathing suit.  AGAIN, we resume our travel onward to the home of our family friends, the G’s , which is about 20 minutes ride over the mountain.  Apparently they left without us, so we jump back into gear and proceed to take the routes “32 and 2” to the beach. 

Half way there, the morning sun begins to make the car seem stuffy to me.  I like breathing, so I attempt to roll my window down (manually, the old way) and …

Mom:  “Close the window.  I’m getting a draft back here.  I will have stiff neck.”

I thought only the Pharoah’s in Egypt were prone to getting stiff-necked, as it said in the Bible.  But I digress.  I negotiate – I know, big surprise there – and can have it open approximately an inch and a half.  The seatbelt restricts me from pushing myself up toward the window to suck in the fresh air. Then the Styrofoam cooler in the super-back of the station wagon begins to squeak when we go over bumps.  It makes my stomach feel funny. 

Me:  “Why can’t you throw that cooler out and buy a plastic one that doesn’t squeak?  When I hear that noise it makes me feel sick to my stomach.”  No.  I’m not kidding.  And to this day, they still have that cooler in the basement somewhere.  I think it became a fishing bait cooler.  I think someday as an unsupervisable adult I will take it in their back yard and light it on fire to see if it returns to hell from whence it came.

We get near the sign that says “Egg Farms” and I decide closing the window is a good idea now.  By the way, they did not make all cars with air conditioning back in those days.  So if you wanted a trip in coolness, you left at the crack of dawn and drove everywhere you could before 10 am when the summer sun would attempt to work the dark side of its powers on car inhabitants.

Me:  “Are we stopping for donuts?”  I really should have a tee shirt that says this.  I also should have investment stock in the biggest franchise for donuts which had its origin in a small village in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  Sometimes we stopped for donuts, sometimes we didn’t.  If it was looking like a no-stop trip, then Someone would have to take it upon themselves to request a potty stop…. “Oh look, there’s a place we could stop to use the restroom (that happens to sell donuts.)  Dad, you could stop there.”  I am not beyond helping the family by being the requestor.  That’s just who I am…. Nice like that.

So we got to the beach and proceeded to park and unpack the vehicle to get closer to locating a spot on the sand for our blanket and towels.  It seemed like a very long walk, even in my memory now 40+ years later.  I, always the opportunist, made one last appeal to yet another reason why we should get a new plastic cooler:  they came with wheels. My father grumbled a bit and we moved onward.  I think it took them ten years to break down and buy the orange cooler.  Sigh.  I was such a pioneer in my thinking, even then.

I must say the polka music was absolutely BLASTING from the pavilion.  You could almost become Polish by osmosis of sound. Our friends were already there, “What thehell took you people so long?”  the husband asked.  My father just shook his head.  I think my father was always a hidden health-nut.  They’d sit down on the beach and his friend, my adopted uncle, would ask:  “So Steve – as if the word “so” was part of his name – You want some juice?”  My mother didn’t have any juice, and for some reason the kids weren’t allowed to have any juice either.  It wasn’t until later when I became aware of the home-spun ways of avoiding liquor regulations on public beaches that I realized why just three adults had juice on our beach blankets.  It also explains why our Auntie Tillie all of a sudden took to dancing on the boardwalk around lunchtime… by herself.  And I guess because she wasn’t our parent, we were not obliged by unwritten kid rules to be embarrassed by her skipping to the polka music…. Or the “la-da-da-da” type of singing she was doing.

During one of these iconic trips to the beach, my father and I were 
walking kind of half way between our beach blanket and the foamy tendrils of the surf.  I turned and saw this guy coming toward him quickly – in bathing suit – with a child’s bucket of surf water.  Picture my face as I saw this guy grab the back of my father’s bathing trunks and DUMP the water down his backside!  My dad spun around, “What the??!!!” and the other man, laughing, reached out and shook his hand.  Turned out it was a distant cousin.  There were actually two cousins – Henyk and Leszyk – in my brain they were kind of like those two cartoon crows Heckle & Jeckle (probably the English translation of their names?) and this guy on the beach was one of them.  I think I’ve seen them only a couple of times in my life but they were kind of legendary somehow.  One of those families had a daughter my age who wasn’t particularly interested in being friendly.  No matter, I really just wanted to play with their Chihuahua pup that they brought to my grandparents’ home when they visited.  She didn’t share the dog either.  So my exposure to the distant cousins remains, well, distant in more ways than one.


You would think that with the eventfulness of the entire day that the trip home would have a sense of unwinding about it.  I believe the word “unraveling” suits it better, though.  We stopped at this diner in Connecticut – and I could not find it to this day if I tried – and my father always took his sunglasses off and rested them on the windowsill.  There was more than one time where we pulled into the driveway at home only to remember the sunglasses he left at the restaurant.  They probably have a box in their back storage room from all the Dad’s over the years that left sunglasses there. 
My favorite episode was the one where he ordered spaghetti.  Perhaps he was still suffering the effects of the hot sun and dehydration from drinking only juice on the beach, or the trauma of having cold ocean water being spilled down his shorts?  But he was famished when that spaghetti hit the table and began to shake on the cheese and swirl the pasta to his fork.  A funny look crossed his face.  The waitress passed by just to check that we had our order, and that all was well.  He remarked, “This spaghetti is different – the sauce is kind of sweet, yet gritty…” and then we realized what happened … as we all looked at the wide shaker on the table …. Which did NOT have parmesan cheese in it.  We all got a good laugh out of that.

Families need story-tellers as much as they need the stories themselves.  It is the story-teller who can put the spin on an event and make everyone laugh at the oddities of life.  Stories unite us.  So the next time I ask you, “What’s your story?” I might want more information!

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