My father became ill in 2000. As his illness worsened over the summer, I reread his memoirs, which thankfully he’d written the previous fall. I also reread every letter and postcard he’d ever sent to me (I’m a packrat, and have many dusty boxes of stuff from the past fifty years of my life). I was searching for the loving, wise words my good father was no longer able to say out loud.
I found this postcard, written when I was twelve years old and away at camp:
July 16, 1963
Hi Din,
How’s you? We’re all fine except for being a little warm; it’s 90 today. There is lot being printed in the paper about the danger of watching the eclipse of the sun coming up this Saturday. Apparently one is not to look directly at the eclipse, even with dark glasses. It seems that even if it is not painful to watch the sun directly, a large amount of infra-red rays enter the eye and can cause permanent damage, burning a part of the retina. I imagine that the camp officials have warned all the boys about this, but, in case they haven’t, take this as an official warning and DON’T look directly at the sun in eclipse even for a few seconds. I still haven’t found a boat, but I’ve been looking. Take care, have fun, stay well!
Love, Pip
My father knew from eclipses that particular summer. His eldest brother, the one who’d given him such joy at the submarine base, had committed suicide, there was trouble at home, and he was having a hard time coming back to the used car lot after studying French literature in his spare time. It is the eternal fate of parents to try to shield their children’s eyes from the burning eclipses they themselves must face and can’t avoid seeing.
The night before he died, the old submariner visited my partner, Carol, and his eldest grandson, Nathaniel, in two separate dreams. Carol told me at breakfast that in her dream my father had been standing next to his hospital bed (after being bedbound for two months in the surreal world of the palliative ward). He was dressed in khaki pants, a light jacket and his favourite sailor’s cap, brought back from the French islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon many years before. A screen obscured his waist and legs (where he’d had cancer), but he was cheerful and smiling. “See,” he told her, with an understated joy, “I’ll be fine.” Moments later, our son Nathaniel came up from his bedroom saying he’d had a strange dream about his grandpa. He had appeared at his bedroom door dressed as if for a journey, wearing nice pants, a light jacket and a sailor’s cap. “I love you,” he told him, then vanished. The next afternoon my father took his last voyage. Five days before, he had celebrated his youngest grandson Jacob’s ninth birthday, an event he had looked forward to all summer. He was smiling during Jacob’s visit, gave him a present, a kiss and some loving words. Moments after we left, he fell into the gentle five-day sleep that took him to the threshold of death, and then beyond.
LIVES OF THE STORYTELLERS
Now I believe it is the easiest thing in the world to tell a story—and the hardest to be a fine storyteller.
RUTH SAWYER, The Way of the Storyteller
THERE ARE TWO EXTREMELY IMPORTANT skills storytellers must learn. The first is how to move furniture. The second is how to carry cups of tea to old women. The furniture part comes because nine times out of ten, you have to put the storytelling space in order. Change the lighting. Move a desk. Shlep the chairs into a circle if, like me, you like curved lines more than straight ones. I’m quite particular about the space when I tell stories. For example, when I’m telling to children I never let them stay behind a desk while they listen. I want my stories to go straight to their bellies, unimpeded by wood, plastic, metal or textbooks.
But far more important is the ability to carry cups of tea to old women. This is how you get to hear the best stories. Exchanging a gift for a story is one of the oldest protocols of oral culture. Following First Nations decorum, people will present an elder with tobacco as a prelude to asking a question or receiving a story. Whenever I visited the Yukon, I would often bring a cup of tea to Angela Sidney, a Tagish elder. Then, her old hands warmed by the tea, she would tell me stories about how Crow made the world. With Angela Sidney, it was tea. With Alice Kane, another of my elders, it was cappuccino, although she never let me pay for it (we were both stubborn, but I had the sense to realize when to concede the field gracefully). I would often drive her on her errands around town, listening to her non-stop storytelling commentary about the city, her friends, her memories of being a children’s librarian, contemporary politics (she kept several voodoo dolls in her closet for the politicians she most abominated) and everything else within her far-ranging ken. It was a fair exchange: a ride for a lavish outpouring of oral wisdom. My third elder was Joan Bodger, an American who had moved to Toronto from New York in 1970, two years before I moved to Canada from Santa Barbara, California. We met for occasional cups of tea or coffee (we alternated for the bill), but I think the thing that most pleased her was simply having a young person come to learn with open ears and an eager heart.
Now that my three mentors have left our green earth, I realize how lucky I was to know them. Although later in this book I describe my local library as my main source of stories, the art itself I learned by spending unhurried time with my elders. Whatever I know of the integrity of the art and the depth of oral literature I learned from Alice Kane, Joan Bodger and Angela Sidney. Teachers can sometimes work in strange ways. They may never tell you anything directly about your work, or coach you, or give you explicit instruction. They may never offer a criticism or even a suggestion, but you are learning all the time. Almost everything I learned from my teachers came to me indirectly: I observed their art, thought hard about their dazzling skills and knowledge, and brought them many cups of tea; in other words, I was a devoted listener to those who knew far more about stories, storytelling and life than I did.
The Saulteaux elder Alexander Wolfe uses a story to explain why he records and tells traditional stories. The tale has been published in Earth Elder Stories.
An old grandfather lived in a large camp beside a great river. There was thick bush across the water, and many trees. He used to go down to the riverbank and build something every day, and one day somebody from the camp asked him what he was doing. He replied:
“You see those trees beyond the river?… If you look closely you will see at one place the bush is thin and beyond there is a plain. I am putting together a boat with which my children and grandchildren may cross the river. Once across the river they can make their way through the bush to the open plain beyond. I have come a long way in life. Life has been good to me. I need not cross this river; I am content to live here the rest of my life. There are many, though, particularly the young, who need to go on, through and beyond all obstacles. With my knowledge and experience, it is my duty to help them face their uncertain future. One day my tracks will come to an end and I shall go to my father and grandfathers. You will continue on this path on which we all walk.”
This is the philosophy of an elder: he builds the boat that will carry his grandchildren into their future. By telling you about my three elders, I hope you will seek out your own. One day the responsibility of building that boat will fall to you.
Angela Sidney, the Tagish elder, was already old when I met her. One of Canada’s most revered storytellers and tradition-bearers, she had come to the Toronto Festival of Storytelling with the anthropologist Julie Cruikshank. When they weren’t at the Festival, the two of them cruised the local malls so Angela could buy presents for her grandchildren. After these shopping expeditions, she came to her sessions, took her drum painted with her clan insignia—a double-tailed beaver—and sang and told ancient medicine songs and stories. I met her again when I began to visit the Yukon International Storytelling Festival. She was eighty-nine years old the last time I visited her, and I spent many hours by her side (“Don’t tell your wife,” she said, laughing). If I followed proper listener’s decorum—didn’t interrupt or ask too many impatient questions—Angela told me stories.
Angela Sidney kn
ew thousands of stories. She had a story about every creek, mountain and settlement in the Yukon. She knew the history of the Native tribes and the European settlers, stories about old-time doctors (shamans), stories about the Yukon gold rush and stories about the extraordinary men and women of her own family. She could trace the lineage of just about everyone who came up to her with the standard greeting: “Hello, Auntie!” and once she’d brought each face into her nearlyblind focus and placed her visitor’s name in its proper matrilineal network, she would half-rise from her wheelchair with an exultant “Gee whiz! It’s good to see you!” (She once asked me, trying to figure out my tribal affiliation, if I was Crow or Wolf—the two largest divisions of the Yukon tribes—and I told her Jewish and gave her a Star of David, which she wore with her Beaver Clan regalia.) And she knew countless stories about Crow.
Crow, in Mrs. Sidney’s telling, didn’t so much make the world as trick it into existence: through a series of Crowish connivances, misdemeanors and scandalous reversals, the scantlings of the world-to-be emerged. “Crow is always stealing things,” she would say (my quotes are based partly on memory, and partly on Cruikshanks’s superb study Life Lived Like a Story). She often used the present tense in telling of his cosmic accomplishments: Crow steals the sun, the light, the moon, the fire, the fish, the rivers—the earth itself, all the necessities of life—from those stingy chiefs who presume to hoard essential resources. “Someone’s always too greedy in these stories!” she’d comment, with a chuckle. And whatever Crow steals he releases into common use. “Go to the skies,” he says, tossing the sun and moon up into the heavens. “Now no one man owns the light—it will be for everybody.” Crow steals the world and gives it away to us, the creatures for whom it is to be a dwelling-place. When he encounters a greedy sea lion lord who’s keeping all the land to himself, Crow kidnaps one of his pups and then trades it back for some grains of sand. “You know how sand’ll sometimes float on the water?” Mrs. Sidney would ask her listeners at this point in the story, “That’s what Crow does—throws it on the water and some of it floats.” And as he casts this sand upon the waters he cries out: “Become a world!”
And there we’d be, me on the grass and Angela Sidney in her wheelchair spinning the tale; and as I listened, sometimes I’d notice a real crow settling nearby on the lawn. Which made me wonder, did she and her Tagish and Tlingit ancestors look at that common, raucous, devious scavenger and see the Bringer of Light, Creator of man and woman, the Worldmaker? Does the spirit of the creator really live on in this embodiment? Is that crow-on-thegrass really Crow? And more than that: what would it be like to live in a world shoplifted and bodied forth into glorious existence by a cosmic force they named after an unpredictable black bird?
You couldn’t take things for granted in such a world. You could certainly never believe there was only one authorized version of anything important. You wouldn’t dream of setting forth on a crusade in the name of Crow to slaughter infidels who happened to believe the world came into being some other way, or that Crow wasn’t the way, the truth and the life. It makes no sense to hoard the truth or any other essential resource if you believe the world is a continual and unexpected gift from a fabulously generous, if somewhat unpredictable Creator. Crow-logic is far too open—sometimes ruthlessly so—and spontaneous to motivate the annihilation of your neighbours for the sake of a story. In a Trickster-wrought creation, hoarding is absurd.
So Crow steals the world and gives it into our care, and that squawking, persistent thief of a bird is still around as a daily reminder of the Creator’s great and paradoxical lesson: the world belongs to us, the world does not belong to us. This is, of course, like the oral tradition itself, which we own most at the very moment of giving it away. By the time an oral story reaches our ears it has passed through many memories, been uttered by many tongues. Stories passed by word of mouth move through the air from teller to teller, always arriving in new places carrying the whispering voices of ancestors: as we held this tale in our remembrance, they murmur, may you shelter it in yours. And so I would lean closer to my Tagish friend and hear the world being created. Crow utters his words of power in myth-time, but I could hear them in 1991, in the almost-ninety-year-old voice of Angela Sidney, great Yukon elder, proud myth-teller, bearer of the double-tailed beaver’s medicine and occasional wearer of a Jewish star. It was her voice that, four weeks before her death in 1991, could still cry out in triumph the words that were first spoken at the beginning of creation: “Become a world!”
I met Alice Kane just after she had retired from the children’s service of the Toronto Public Library. She was working as the part-time curator of the Marguerite Bagshaw Storytelling and Puppetry Collection, in a little basement office in the Palmerston Library. Alice Kane had the good fortune to work as a children’s librarian when the library was a cultural sanctuary we can barely imagine today. The women in her profession—and they were a formidable sisterhood—were no “information resource workers,” or whatever term is used these days. They knew every book in their collection, they knew thousands of stories by heart, and they were able to match a book or story to the individual kids who came to the library after school and for Saturday storytimes. The world outside this haven could be pretty rough. The kids came from impoverished backgrounds, mostly with first-generation immigrant parents. From the Depression to the Second World War, their lives were lived on the edge of hunger, violence, political turmoil. Their older brothers were battling fascist mobs in Christie Pits park (a little-known part of Toronto history) as Alice’s listeners sat on the carpet and listened to Russian fairy tales. The library was truly a good place to be as the world beyond spun towards war.
When I met her, I was a twenty-two-year-old mess. I was heartbroken from a failed romance, I was discouraged about the possibility of ever conquering my paralyzing shyness and becoming a storyteller, I missed my California friends and was finding Canada hard to get used to; I was, in short, a most confused and unhappy young man. Alice was a fine listener, completely unsentimental, always encouraging. Her philosophy was based on her wonder tales, where the heroes, however perilous their obstacles, must face life directly and with the highest spirits they could muster. Almost every time I saw her for the rest of our friendship, she greeted me with a hymn: Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone, dare to have a purpose firm, and dare to make it known!
I’d sit in the office and pour my heart out as Alice, her red hair just going to white, listened patiently. Sometimes she wore a magic necklace (at least it seemed so to me). It was the polished, amber-coloured cross-section of a peach pit, which she wore on a simple chain. It looked like a Celtic design, something she might have brought over from her native Ireland—intricately interwoven and very mysterious. My topsy-turvy life shone back at me from the necklace, and I felt that in the world of the woman who wore such a design there would be room for all stories, all destinies, however crazy and desperate they seemed to the ones who inhabited them.
It took a while before I actually heard her tell stories; when I did, I was hooked. I spent the next twenty-five years following Alice Kane, listening to her stories, talking about the art of storytelling, gossiping and sharing countless cups of cappuccino at our favourite Toronto café. We travelled together to England, to the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and to the international storytelling festival in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory. One of the great encounters of contemporary storytelling was when Alice Kane met Angela Sidney. They immediately recognized each other as spiritual sisters.
We worked together on a ten-year collaboration with the Irish harper Eithne Heffernan exploring Irish myths and wonder tales. Alice was a Northern Irish Presbyterian, Eithne a Catholic from the Republic of Ireland, and we often laughed that it took an American Jew to bring them together.
Every time I heard her tell stories, I wondered how she was able, with the simplest of elements, to create such vivid verbal tapestries in my mind. A good part of her
power came from her voice. It still carried the cadence of her Belfast upbringing, and was perfectly suited to the long wonder tales she loved to tell. When I read Jean Mansour’s description of the voice of his mother, a traditional singer from the mountains of Morocco, it reminded me of Alice Kane’s voice. It had a quality that conveyed the sense of a world glimpsed beyond the horizon of everyday life, a world so fine and full it was impossible—almost—to put into words. “I am not able,” writes Mansour of the singing of his mother, Fadhma, the bearer of Kabyle tradition, “to describe to you the moving quality of her voice, her power of incantation. She wasn’t even conscious of it herself, and these songs weren’t works of art for her, but spiritual instruments she used, just as the weaver uses the wool, the miller the wheat… She had a clear voice, almost without timbre, never the least attempt to go beyond the material. Over the long carrying echoes of her voice floated a nostalgia infinitely far off, the feeling of an unattainable yet close-by presence, the presence of that inner land whose beauty is sensed only when one knows one has lost it.”
Suddenly They Heard Footsteps Page 8
