Storytellers...

  Are you a storyteller?

  Do you have the storyteller gene?

  Are you nurturing your storytelling skill?

  What is a storyteller?  I think the first requirement is you need to remember stuff.  You remember things most folks have forgotten.  Of course, when you venture into things other folks have forgotten they may think your stories are apocryphal, a twenty-five-dollar-word that simply means they think you’re full of shit, your stories can’t be verified, they’re pulled from the mists of time, pulled from a time that few remember.  That’s the risk a storyteller runs. 
  I couldn't tell you why I like to tell tales.  Maybe there's a part of me that wants to tell someone a tale so they'll beware of certain pitfalls in life, that "thar be dragons" out there on the primrose-lined path of life.  Maybe I just want to entertain.  Maybe it's telling a tale of an interesting tid-bit of family history.

  My brother has questioned a number of my tales of family life through the years.  My brother is not a storyteller.  Many times after I told a tale of life when I lived with our grandparents and such he’d say, “Oh I don’t believe that.”

  “Are you calling me a liar, bro?” I asked him one time.

  He paused.

  “No,” he said, “I’ve just never heard this stuff before.

  Veracity is the realm of the researcher, reporter, historian and teacher.  The telling of the tale, ah, that’s the realm of storytellers.

  I think I got the “storytelling gene” from my grandmother, my father’s mother…I lived with her and my grandfather my last years in high school.  My grandmother would sit in her easy chair, a filterless Raleigh cigarette in her right hand, as she told story after story of life in the mountains of western Virginia.

  My oldest daughter has the storyteller gene too.

  I have no research to back this up but I believe the best storytellers mostly come from out here in "The Golden West" or the American South. 

  That’s where Coach Bob* was from.

  Bob’s gone now, but he’s one of those folks I’ll remember all my life.  When I saw the movie “Big Fish” I thought of Bob, the teller of tall tales, tales you couldn’t really verify, they were believable but you weren’t quite sure if they were possible.

  Like his tale of running the bar at the non-com club on Okinawa during the Korean War.

  “Yeah, I had this monkey at the bar,” Bob said, “and if I needed to cut someone off, I’d have the monkey go over and piss in the guy’s drink.” 

  There was the story of how Bob ended up in Roswell.

  “Yeah, me and the family were headed west and we broke down out there on the Caprock east of Roswell.  I hitched a ride into town, asked if they needed a coach.  They did.  I had a job in a couple of hours, then me and the players went back to the family, hooked up the car and came back to town.”

  I found out sometime later Bob had the job lined up, the family just broke down just before they got to Roswell.  For years I believed Bob had landed the coach’s job just like he said.

  In his life Coach Bob had fought in the Korean War, sold houses, had his own country music show and more.  He told lots of stories, lots of jokes. 

  And he remembered.

  Coach Bob had a mind like a steel trap, as they say.

  One day in 1996, sitting in his home in Roswell he told me a poem he called “The Water Cure.”  It was so good I wrote it down.

  “Sometime when you’re feeling important, sometime when your ego’s in bloom; sometime when you take it for granted you’re the best qualified in the room; sometime when you feel that your going would leave an unfillable hole;  just follow these simple instructions and see how they humble your soul.

  “Take a bucket and fill it with water, put your hand in it up to the wrist; pull it out, and the hole that’s remaining, is a measure of how you’ll be missed.

  “You can splash all you wish when you enter, you may stir up the water galore;
but stop and you’ll find that in no time it looks quite the same as before.

  “The moral of this quaint example, is do just the best that you can.  Be proud of yourself but remember, there’s no indispensable man.”

  “I memorized that for my players,” Bob said.  “When you have a team of young’uns, you have a few that come through who think they’re the end-all to beat-all.  I’d make them listen to me recite those words.”

  For years I thought it was something Coach Bob made up.  Then when The Great and Powerful Internet was in full flower I did a little poking around and found out the poem was first published in 1959, written by Saxon White Kessinger and titled “The Indispensable Man.”  What struck me as I saw the familiar words on a website was I had it written in my journal just as Coach Bob had recited it, he knew that poem word for word after so many years.

Coach Bob was a storyteller, and a good one at that.  He may have embellished the truth a bit, but so what?

So if you’re a storyteller, tell those tales.

They help us all remember, make us smile.

And make us think.

-30-

*Name changed