Posts Tagged ‘storytelling’
Annual Occurrences
The smell of blueberry pancakes and delicious breakfast sausage frying on the outdoor grills lingered in my senses all day long yesterday. Under a beautiful blue sky, we mingled with locals, leisurely devouring the sweet maple goodness while enjoying one of the great storytellers I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. Tom Sherry owned “Best Built Fence” when we moved here, and he and his wife, Sue, helped us design the layout of our paddocks and pasture fence lines.
Tom is one of those people who radiate the fullness of life with dramatic tales about his many adventures. He will always define, in my mind, our experience of moving to rural Pierce County, and what it is like to live here. I always feel better about being here after spending time with him.
Another annual event kicked off yesterday as our neighbor to the north plowed the field adjacent to our property.
Asher was barking up a storm over the presence of the highly revved big tractor slowly making its way back and forth on the other side of our natural fence of piled tree limbs. I spotted the son following along on an ATV, picking rocks, and saw it as an opportunity.
When Raymond stopped to survey his progress, I hollered to him, and he trudged across the field to appear friendly. I see him as being the opposite of Tom in terms of storytelling. Getting information from Raymond requires a sweet-talking effort, and even then, the responses sound a bit like forced confessions.
He tells me he intends to plant alfalfa in the field this year, but he seemed to feel it was unlikely to happen. I gather it had something to do with how wet the field is. There was no concern about the value of the fieldstone his son had collected. My place was as good as any other to dump the small wagonload he had amassed.
I hope the threat of possible thunderstorms tomorrow doesn’t result in us experiencing one of those downpours that wash his freshly tilled soil over Cyndie’s perennial garden again.
The first forest wildflowers of spring are showing up. The annual blooming of Bloodroot blossoms is always a fun accent to the orchestra of greens emerging after the ground truly thaws.
Just a few hours later, with the sun dropping lower into advancing clouds as the day was coming to an end, the flowers were folding up their glory.
The speed of growing grasses and leaves is picking up, and soon that patch of bloodroot will be a carpet of large leaves dominating the vicinity. Watching it all unfold in a few days’ time is one of the many rewards of walking a dog multiple times daily through our woods. Daily throughout the twelve months of changing seasons is a pretty great perspective to gain about a lot of things.
Nature’s annual occurrences are always fascinating performances to witness in person.
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Additional Detail
We enjoyed the day after Cyndie’s performance with a sigh of relief over her having accomplished the feat she had devoted so much time and energy to.
With the time-limited storytelling out of the way, I’d like to add a little behind-the-scenes context to the drama of that moment when the wedding cake crashed to the floor. Yeah, she wanted to scream. Consider these added tidbits…
- Cyndie had taken a full day off from work to bake the cakes on the Friday before the wedding. She hadn’t planned on having a distressing day at work on that Thursday triggering a decision to seek an immediate change of employment. That decision was linked to an opportunity with an application deadline of 9 a.m. Friday morning. Cyndie started her day at 4 a.m. to update her curriculum vitae and compose a cover letter by 8 o’clock for a courier to deliver in the nick of time.
- Then, she started baking cakes for the planned 12-hour project. Random interruptions pushed that allotted time to nearly 18 hours. Somewhere in there, our daughter, Elysa came home feeling unwell and I crashed with her in our bedroom. When Cyndie came up to sleep, she found Elysa in our bed so she moved to Elysa’s room instead. A short time later, after midnight, our phone rings and Julian answers. His young cousin is sick and wants to talk to Cyndie.
- Julian comes into our room looking for his mom and is totally confused about not finding her there. We get the phone to Cyndie in Elysa’s room and find out her brother’s kids are being watched by a grandparent with limited English skills while the parents are traveling. The boy is suffering a terrible bout of flu and asks if Cyndie would come over because grandpa’s only solution is to go to the hospital.
- Cyndie drives over and is basically up the rest of the night assisting with bouts of vomiting.
- She finally makes it home early on Saturday morning to thoroughly shower any and all sickness off her before preparing to depart with cakes for the wedding venue.
She had reasons to scream before she even started assembling the wedding cake that day.
Only a few people enjoying Cyndie’s storytelling at The Moth slam on Wednesday night knew the full detail of how stressful that dramatic disaster really was for our hero.
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Cyndie’s Story
Two weeks ago, I wrote about us attending a Moth story slam in advance of Cyndie’s plan to submit her name for an opportunity to tell her wedding cake story at the Amsterdam Bar & Hall in St. Paul. For those of you who weren’t able to hear her tell it in person last night, she has allowed me to post a written version for you.
Cyndie’s name was selected tenth –the last slot, out of twenty that had signed up for the chance.
Imagine Cyndie walking up on stage, standing under the lights in front of a microphone, and addressing a packed house. She is allowed only 5 minutes…
When my niece got engaged, she asked her mother to sew her wedding dress, and her grandma to knit a shawl and asked if I would bake a simple wedding cake. Thrilled, I said yes immediately… even though I’d never made a wedding cake before. Friends expressed concern over the huge responsibility I’d taken on given my lack of experience with wedding cakes. But I love to bake and was inspired by my niece’s invitation. I embraced this cake-baking opportunity with equal measures of optimism and naiveté.
That year, I baked dozens of practice cakes to test out on family and friends. I was blamed for inches added to waistlines and my reputation for baking in excess soared to new heights. It took me about 40 hours to mold sugar paste into candied pearls and colorful, edible flowers. With all that practice, my confidence grew and so did the cake. What started as a simple wedding cake had become a five-tier, white chocolate, lemon-raspberry layered masterpiece, stuffed with extra love.
Days before the wedding, my friend asked me how I planned to transport the cakes to the venue. I’d been so focused on baking, I hadn’t given it a thought. I quickly discovered that my mustang convertible with bucket seats is NOT the car for the job. My friend bails me out by loaning me her practical 4-door sedan as long as I drive and relieve her of any responsibility for the safe delivery of the cakes.
On the big day, I load up the car with boxes of cakes, buckets of extra frosting, edible decorations, and fresh flowers. I’m so nervous about transporting the cakes that I drive like a Sunday driver, on a Saturday! Thankfully, all the cakes arrive intact.
I carry the boxes of cakes like they are newborn babies and begin to carefully assemble the tiers of cake with the stands and pillars. I’m so meticulous about frosting and decorating each level to perfection that it takes me 2.5 hours just to finish the first four tiers. But I’m happy- already the cake is nearly 3 feet high and it looks as stunning as I’d hoped it would be.
As I reach to place the final tier, I hear a loud snap and then another one, as the pillars give way under the weight of the cake, and, in horror, I watch the cake topple over and crash onto the floor. A busboy says, “You are so [effed]” as he and the wait staff all run for cover in the kitchen. I can barely breathe but I manage to warn my friend, “DO. NOT. SAY. A THING.” She doesn’t and takes cover behind the bar.
I can’t believe I have just ruined my niece’s wedding day. This is exactly what my friends had warned me about. I can hear all the “I told you so’s” and the “what were you thinking’s” and see the evidence of not being enough piled high on top of the inglorious mess. I want to scream but I can’t because the only thing separating the wedding chapel from the reception hall is a thin, moveable partition.
Then the organist begins to play, “Here Comes the Bride.” I AM SO [EFFed]! My friend appears next to me with a shot of whiskey she’d stolen from the bar. I don’t drink whiskey, but on this day, I did. She asked, “What are you going to do?”
I have two choices- I can succumb to the despair of this epic fail or I have to rise up and fight with all the love in my heart to make the simple cake my niece had asked for. The fight is on. Baking in excess is now my saving grace. I have enough backup cakes. The groom’s cake is still intact and I can use fresh flowers to decorate so I kick my inner critic to the curb and ask for help.
The busboy –yeah, that one!– comes to my aid and scoops up the four-tier disaster on the floor, a waiter brings a fresh tablecloth and my friend fearlessly rips open the boxes and hands me back-up cakes as fast as I can frost & decorate them. I have to finish Wedding Cake 2.0 by the time the ceremony ends in less than 20 minutes.
I finish the second cake just in time to see the mother-of-the-bride walk into the reception hall, look at the cake, and, burst into tears. She says, “I didn’t cry at all during the ceremony but when I saw the cake… It’s so beautiful.” And it really was!
Sometimes, even I have a hard time believing the miracle that happened that day. But the radiant look on my niece’s face when she thanked me for baking her wedding cake helps me remember that anything is possible when I let love lead the way.
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Out of the ten storytellers, Cyndie’s performance earned a second place score from the judges, losing out by half a point to a tale that included both a tornado and nudity. The evening was a smashing (pun intended) success and made all the sweeter by the support of family and friends who showed up to cheer her on.
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Writing Words
Relative Something is a blog. The word blog is short for weblog, as in, world wide web + log [regular record of incidents]. Blogs are written in an informal conversational style. I write about my experiences like I would describe them if we were just hanging out, minus the pauses when I can’t think of the word I want to use. A thesaurus is my friend.
It would embarrass me greatly if the frequency of my error in using a word were prominently displayed on my posts. I am forever grateful for the intuition to double-check a dictionary and thesaurus. I don’t write exactly like I talk but I do write the way thoughts and ideas come into my head. Another thing I am forever grateful for is the dialogue I was surrounded by growing up. My vocabulary came from hearing the words my mom and dad used while WCCO radio and television broadcasts ran as a background soundtrack.
It is not rare that a sentence will come into my head with a word that I don’t recognize as coming from my own common usage but feels connected to something my mother would say.
Yesterday, as I steeled myself against a biting wind chill, I caught myself doing the classic “air whistle” that is an obvious habit my mom displayed. I have tried to grow out of that natural tendency, with little success beyond increased awareness of occasions when I am doing it. At the same time, it’s a habit that always draws memories of my mom from deep in my soul and brings a feeling of pride over being one of her kids.
Why would I try to get myself to stop this behavior? Maybe it’s a remnant of the urge to grow up and become my own person.
I am unabashedly a product of my upbringing and my ancestral heritage but I have the desire to grow well beyond simply being like my parents. Striving to be healthier in mind, body, and spirit has helped me to interrupt a pattern of familial depression and the use of alcohol as (an ineffective –even detrimental) treatment.
I don’t have a memory of my parents writing poetry but I have read the poems of another of my ancestral relatives. My inclination is to assemble words in a rhythmic pattern that appeals to my senses. That often drives the selection of a word more than the meaning of the word itself. When the collection of words is stacked up, the variety of possible intentions often surprises me. I don’t always know what the poems are saying about me but I have learned that readers often come to their own conclusions.
Helping Cyndie to shape and reshape a story she hopes to tell in a week and a half has been a fun experience for me. It is blurring the differences between verbal stories and written chronicles. Either way, readers or listeners are forming their own interpretations in their minds, conjuring mental images and feeling whatever emotions the words inspire.
I have a feeling her project could help me to become a better writer of stories about the experiences of *this* John W. Hays.
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Grand Slam
One of the things Cyndie decided to do to occupy herself during the months she was laid up with a broken ankle was to explore storytelling. “The Moth” level of storytelling. She bought their book about storytelling and started writing down details of stories from her life experiences that seemed worthy of telling. She picked the date of a local Moth story slam at the end of this month and has been working on honing one of her stories down to an effective 5-minute version.
Last night, we drove to St. Paul to get an in-person taste of Moth storytelling at the Fitzgerald Theater. It was their GrandSLAM Championship where nine winners of previous story slams competed against each other with 5-minute stories based on a common theme of “Crash Course.”
At the end of the night, my first question to her was, “Did that change your mind about throwing your name in the hat?”
It didn’t. I find it difficult to understand that she won’t even know if she will have a chance to try until the night of the event because they pull 10 names out of a hat to determine whose stories will be told. I don’t know how many people show up hoping to be selected to stand on stage in front of a microphone under a bright light in front of a large audience, but I’d guess it will be more than ten.
Last night we got the chance to see what aspects of the storytelling worked well and what Cyndie might want to keep in mind if she gets the chance to tell her story of baking and assembling a wedding cake for our niece’s wedding. The versions Cyndie has been trying out have changed a lot from when she started. The Moth asks that stories be “known by heart but not rote memorization.”
Whittling down the entire experience of a compelling story into a 5-minute version forces you to figure out what details are essential and which ones don’t contribute to the main point. Moving from reading it to “telling” it by memory gets tricky with multiple versions floating around in her mind.
Only one storyteller last night had a moment of visibly losing their train of thought. The emcee did a great job of rallying the crowd to support all storytellers with a lot of love and we cheered the person with encouragement and her story resumed flawlessly in short order.
“The Moth’s mission is to promote the art and craft of storytelling and to honor and celebrate the diversity and commonality of human experience.”
Cyndie has countless stories worth telling. I’m thrilled she has chosen to develop greater mastery of the art of telling them well and doing so in larger venues.
It’s a bonus for me because I LOVE listening to well-told stories. That is… when I’m not too busy trying to tell one of my own. Why don’t I try getting on a Moth stage? I think it comes down to the part about knowing the story by heart and telling it in 5-minutes. On a stage.
I’d rather write my stories in a blog.
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Next Act?
Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat. Nothin’ up my sleeve… Presto! It’s definitely time to get a new hat.
I’m back at the day-job today, after a week of vacation. It’s both soothing in its normalcy, and dreadful for… well, returning to work after vacation. Despite the excitement of a couple more birthday celebrations this week and the coming Independence Day holiday, I’m feeling as though there is a certain lack of the next big thing planned on our horizon.
During last week’s cycling and camping adventures, I had an opportunity to meet and greet a lot of first-timers to the Tour of Minnesota. Never being one to make a long story short, I found myself frequently offering a wide range of the tales which have provided most of Relative Something’s content over the last nine years.
What is this blog about?
I started it when my big trek in the Himalayas was about to occur. Shortly after that, Cyndie and I set out to visit Ian in Portugal. That seeded everything that eventually led to where we are today, providing stories about Cyndie working in Boston for a year, my getting the Eden Prairie house ready to sell, moving to Beldenville, WI, getting a dog, connecting with our friends, the Morales family in Guatemala, bringing horses onto the property, starting up Wintervale operations, building a labyrinth garden, and most recently, our antics with raising free-range chickens.
The cast of characters in my stories evolves, but the basic storyline of what makes the “pages” here rarely strays very far from what is going on in my mind at any given moment. It energizes my mental health to share my experiences with discovering and treating my depression, as well as my tales of identifying my addiction to sugar and the challenges of working that ongoing recovery program.
Currently, my health is good, both mentally and physically (despite an ongoing angst over the fiasco that is the US Government), my car is back from the body shop and looks brand new again, the horses look noticeably thinner after my week away from them, all twelve chickens appear to be thriving, and both dog and cat welcomed me home with loads of sweet attention.
Actually, the horses were pretty affectionate, as well. Elysa captured this shot of me giving Hunter a good scratch around his ears. All three horses lingered for some uncharacteristic extended face-time with me as I offered to scratch whatever itches they presented.
So, what’s next? What do I have up my sleeve for the next act?
I don’t know.
But trust me, you’ll find out as soon as I do.
What else would I do but write about it here?
The next adventure is out there somewhere down the trail. Until then, I expect our animals will continue to provide their usual fodder for lessons in life on the ranch.
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Relative Something 