Telling Stories

In the early part of the last century, a brilliant but eccentric linguist and ethnographer named John Peabody Harrington was doing field work documenting disappearing Native American dialects among the remaining remote villages in California. One summer day, he asked an elder in one village to recount some of the special stories passed down from one generation to the next but he was met with awkward silence. He badgered the elder but to no avail. Eventually, it was explained that the telling of sacred stories was reserved for the long nights of winter, to speak of them during the summer was considered shameful and disrespectful.

I thought of this over the Thanksgiving weekend when I was gathered with my family. At a picked-over table with dirty dessert dishes and half-filled cups of coffee we shared the recent events of our lives and re-lived the embellished stories that have moved into the category of family lore. But these are not the only stories we tell during the long nights. Some of us who are readers keep our stories with us in paperback or e-reader form. I have one at home and one in the car. But many of these are small stories, shared among friends or borrowed from the library.

Sometimes I think our favorite sacred or special stories come to us not just in words, but in pictures, moving pictures. Growing up, whenever the Wizard of Oz was shown on TV, it was an event that included not just the youngest but the oldest too. Popcorn was popped, hot chocolate made, we fussed to get the best spot in front of the TV and when the movie started you could hear a pin drop. We probably all have our own version of what our sacred stories are (we probably own them on DVD or, worse on vhs tapes). To Kill a Mockingbird, 2001 A Space Odyssey, The African Queen, E.T., It's a Wonderful Life, The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Rocky, The Shawshank Redemption, Jaws and The Sound of Music, any of these might easily be included in the nation's, if not our own, list.

The medium may have changed several times since one story was uttered around a roaring fire (in a language only an odd linguist might recognize) but the reality remains that we both seek and learn deeper truths about ourselves and our world by taking part in the storytelling of our own day. In the fractious world in which we currently find ourselves, these stories offer some common ground, some common understanding of life, something we can ALL talk about.

It's easy to think that the "old ways" of any culture are lost or forgotten or irrelevant and yet we repeat them in our own way, in our own time (and think we invented them!) but I like to think that the truth about us is timeless and that each generation must discover this truth for themselves, in whatever form it occurs.

Tim Bulone is an ardent observer of life on the swirling blue marble. He works at Davis Group Consulting and creates fine art and canvas prints which he likes to sell from time to time at http://www.MyFamilyArt.com He is an early morning pedestrian in Belmont Shore, where he resides with his wife.