Suddenly They Heard Footsteps

by Dan Yashinsky

  A few years ago, after a series of small strokes, Alice finally retired. She gradually faded into the fragility of extreme old age. In her final years I visited her whenever I could in her nursing home. She sat silent and immobile, her head drooping that once was held so proudly erect. I would read poetry aloud, priming her with old, familiar words: “The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things…” and from the ruins of her once-grand story mind a frail voice would sometimes whisper, “of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax, and cabbages and kings.” Then we’d chime in together on: “and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings.” She once knew thousands of poems by heart, and hundreds of stories, many of them long wonder tales. Alice Kane grew up in Belfast, immersed in oral rhymes, songs, prayers, her father’s rather salty sea shanties, Presbyterian hymns, the words of Kipling and the King James Bible. Even in the misty land of her senility, she still spoke the old rhymes with a certain incantatory power. She was frail and fading, but the great House of Story where she once abided had yet a foundation.

  One of her favourite stories was “The Wondersmith and His Son,” an Irish myth she adapted from Ella Young’s telling. When the Wondersmith—known in Gaelic as the Gubbaun Saor—is dying, his son and daughter come to him:

  So they went into the house and the Wondersmith, the Gubbaun Saor, sat in his chair dressed as if to receive kings. And the son said to him, “My father, have you a word for us?” “I had the Master Word,” he told him, “but I have forgotten it. I have lost it, it is gone.” And the son beat his breast and he said, “He will die, he will die, and he will not leave his wisdom to us.” And he sat like that, he sat like that, not speaking and barely moving for a whole moon. And the son kept saying, “The time is so short, the time is so short.”

  When Alice Kane sat in her wheelchair as silent as the Wondersmith, I’d hold her thin, cool hand and ponder: what is the Master Word of a great storyteller? What is the Master Word that can communicate a legacy of stories, a technique for telling them, and the joy of language spoken so unforgettably? But of course with storytelling there is no “master word,” only the story, connecting first to one person, then to another and another, in a fragile thread or chain of narrative always at risk of breaking, always in need of the storyteller’s powers of remembrance.

  Joan Bodger, my third mentor, had a sign on her apartment door: Knock Resolutely! Woe betide you if you knocked with anything less than conviction and courage. I met her at the very beginning of my storytelling career. She was telling stories once a month at a soul food restaurant in Toronto called the Underground Railroad, and when I saw how she held the adult audience I realized it might be possible to take storytelling beyond the realm of children.

  She herself knocked with great resolution on every door she faced, and she credited her perseverance and risktaking to the wealth of stories she heard as a child. Born in Oakland, California, on August 31, 1923, Joan was the daughter of admirals on both sides of her family. Her father was in the American Coast Guard, and her grandfather had sailed under the British flag. She was raised to love the sea. She was also raised by a storytelling mother who filled her childhood with an inexhaustible stream of poems, family lore, folk tales and the classics of English children’s literature. In her memoir The Crack in the Teacup: The Life of an Old Woman Steeped in Stories, Joan Bodger describes how this story-rich upbringing set her on a path of intellectual adventure: “How did I become a storyteller? We ate and drank stories for dinner. They were our mass, our communion.” She shared this passion for literature in How the Heather Looks: A Joyous Journey to the British Sources of Children’s Books and was very pleased when a retired children’s librarian told her it was the book most stolen by retiring children’s librarians.

  Joan Bodger was a scholar of myth. Her quest for goddess mythology took her to Petra, Jordan, to study the ancient Nabataeans and their goddess Atargatis, and to all the Arthurian sites in Britain, where she told stories of Sir Gawain, Arthur, and the Winter Hag at the very places where the myths began. She liked to see things for herself, to go to the source, to decode secrets. In the Second World War she worked in the code room at the Pentagon. Throughout her work she was fascinated with stories like “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Tom Tit Tot,” where the hero or heroine breaks a spell by guessing the secret name of a powerful spirit. She found many echoes in contemporary society, where many of the powers that influence our lives are impenetrable, mysterious or secret: IMF, CIA, al-Qaeda. Just before she died, she was researching the Luddite movement in early-eighteenth-century England. These early revolutionaries had understood the hidden truth behind the machinery: that increasing standardization of labour would inevitably bring with it the destruction of community life. In Joan’s view they were the first to resist what we now call the “global economy,” and she wanted to tell their story so today’s young protestors would know they had active and honourable ancestors.

  Joan Bodger was, for me, a real-life version of the Wife of Bath from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Like her, Joan was independent, high-spirited, generously proportioned, gap-toothed, outspoken and extraordinarily attractive. “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” about the knight who must save his life by finding the secret of what it is that all women want, was one of Joan’s favourite stories. In Chaucer, the knight discovers that all women desire “sovereynetee.” As Joan told the tale, the magic, spellbreaking answer is “to be what you would be, when you choose to be that.” She carried this philosophy into every aspect of her personal and professional life, including her response to the cancer she developed in her late seventies.

  When she was diagnosed with cancer in 2000, she began making plans to return to the Pacific coast. She chose Tofino, B.C. as her final abode, and was ever on the lookout for whales in Clayoquot Sound, which she could see from the window of Tofino General Hospital. The citizens of her new community welcomed her, appreciated her and were with her through her dying. For a myth-teller like Bodger, whales meant a great deal. She used to savour her father’s favourite tall tale, from Benjamin Franklin: “There is no more noble or magnificent sight,” Franklin told his credulous French friends, “than that of the Atlantic whales, as they leap up Niagara Falls on the way to their spawning grounds.”

  Joan Bodger spent her last few days covered by a button blanket embroidered with a killer whale, a gift from a new circle of native friends in Tofino.

  On my last visit to Joan, I spent a few days sharing tea and stories in the palliative care unit in the Tofino hospital. I was staying on Vargas Island, a few kilometres across the Sound. One day I walked the trail that cuts across the island to Ahous Bay on the Pacific side. It is a rough trail that barely stays above the rainforest muck on either side. Two-thirds of the way along, I came to an official-looking yellow sign: TRAIL CLOSED—BRIDGES REMOVED. It was a real Joan Bodger moment. I thought of her courage, her willingness to improvise, her open-hearted ability to knock resolutely. Then I climbed past the barricade and, after another kilometre of hiking, pushed through thick green bushes and stood on a vast crescent of beach. Before me stretched Joan’s beloved western ocean. It was the essence of her hard-earned wisdom that, even if the trail is closed and the bridges removed, your own passage can become a new bridge for those who follow.

  Angela Sidney, Alice Kane and Joan Bodger were my elders. I hope that as you set out on your storytelling journey, you find your own teachers and elders. Bring them tea, carry them cappuccinos; most important, share the gift of your time and listening. Your gifts will come back to you tenfold in their wisdom and blessing.

  SPEAKING STORY

  It is a remarkable story that I have to relate.

  GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO, The Decameron

  PEOPLE ARE DRAWN TO STORYTELLING for many reasons today, and use the art in a wide range of settings. Teachers are finding new ways to make storytelling part of the classroom, public speakers adapt stories for more effective presentations, doctors and therapists use storytelling as p
art of their healing practice, and activists find that stories give them a new vocabulary for working towards social justice. There are also those who want, as I did, to make storytelling their livelihood. At a less formal level, there is a growing interest in storytelling as an art that flourishes in everyday life—in conversation, family lore and the oral history of local communities.

  Alice Kane used to tell a story about a mother mouse who took her children with her when she went for food. She warned them to be very quiet and very careful. A fierce cat was roaming the neighbourhood, and the young mice had to follow their mother without making a peep. They found a piece of cheese in the alleyway and were just about to pick it up when suddenly the cat sprang in front of them. The cat looked at the mother mouse’s children and licked its lips. Just before it pounced, the mother mouse drew herself up to her full height (which wasn’t much) and barked: BOW WOW! GRRRR! WOOF! The cat ran away, terrified. They took the cheese home and as they ate, the mother mouse said, “My children, you have learned an important lesson today. You must always know how to speak a second language.”

  Whatever your mother tongue, every human being speaks Story as a second language. Through the stories they carry and retell, families and communities gain the expressive capacity to speak about the things that matter most to them. Storytellers are the custodians of this language made of stories. They have the dual responsibility of sustaining and enriching the community’s body of narratives, and of reminding their fellow citizens that it is to their benefit to speak Story as fluently as possible.

  We learn to communicate through metaphor and image at a very young age. We learn by hearing and exchanging rhymes, songs, poems, riddles, nonsense verse, family stories, fairy tales and jokes. In this common language made of stories, we can speak about our unique experiences and feelings, however extreme or surprising they may be. In a living oral tradition, stories are the moral and imaginative frame of life itself. When the anthropologist Julie Cruikshank asked Yukon Indian women to tell their life histories, she found they invariably wanted to begin with myth and legend. “From the beginning,” she writes, “several of the eldest women responded to my questions about secular events by telling traditional stories… Each explained that these narratives were important to record as part of her life story.” Their lives, in other words, were inseparably interwoven with the myths they had inherited and kept alive.

  A sense of this profound connection comes through in a comment Angela Sidney made to Cruikshank after a long recording session: “Well… I’ve tried to live my life right, just like a story.” Myths helped Sidney understand, express and renew her own life and the life of her people. The stories we keep in our heads and hearts are, as Mats Rehnman and Jenny Hostetter write in The Voice of the Story, the “maps that allow us to understand the stream of events that make up our lives.” It seems to me that this is true whether the stories you live by are ancient and traditional or spontaneously created and kept alive within families and personal memory. These maps in the form of remembered stories serve to guide us on “the paths between the worlds,” in the poet Robert Bringhurst’s telling phrase about Alice Kane’s stories: “The paths, for instance, between the world of the village and the world of the forest; between childhood and marriage, community and solitude, and the paths between the worlds of life and death, and the worlds of waking and dreaming.”

  At a very practical level, an immersion in the language of stories is also an education for the tongue. We learn to use words with a heightened sense of their power and music. The words of stories have an energy and beauty that aren’t required of them in normal talk. Ted Potochniak, a Toronto storyteller and gifted elementary school teacher, told his grade-four students countless folk tales. One day the worst bully in the school came to Potochniak in tears: he had chosen the wrong person to pick on. His “victim,” inspired by a story, had turned on him and said, “Get thee hence, thou wicked wretch!” As Ted pointed out, if she’d retaliated with the conventional schoolyard curse—“Eff off!”—he would have known how to respond, and pounded her; but her ancient and powerful vocabulary completely undid him.

  When I teach storytelling workshops, we begin by exploring the students’ oral heritage. Who were the chief storytellers within your own families? Through stories, did you get to know a particular place very well, although you never saw it yourself? How did your parents meet? Responding to such questions, you realize that you come with a storytelling lineage. I also like to ask for the proverbs and sayings they grew up with. These comprise the miniatures of oral literature, and are part of our earliest education in using imaginative language. Every family has its own unique sayings and expressions.

  In my own family, for example, we like to say “Get out of the car!” if anything unusual happens. As with all family sayings, there’s a specific context for this one. When I was growing up in Detroit, my father sold used cars for a living. He also took night courses for many years at Wayne State University, and ended his working life as a professor of French language and literature in Toronto. However, back in his car-lot days, he had a man working for him named Jerry Morgan. Jerry was always getting pulled over by the police (or, as we say in Detroit, the po-lice). He was African-American, and in the 1950s that was enough of a reason to get pulled over (and still is, in too many parts of North America). When they stopped his car they’d shout, “Get out of the car!” and they wouldn’t bother saying, “please” or “sir.” Jerry subverted their bullying ways by making this his life-motto. When things went well he’d say it jubilantly. When there was trouble, it became a dirge. Then it passed into our family lore, and you will, as I say, hear it around the house whenever something noteworthy occurs.

  A few other favourite examples, gathered catch-as-catchcan over the years:

  Much wants more but often meets with less. From a teacher who grew up in a family of six.

  Un peu de rien tout nu. (A little bit of naked nothing.) The reply of a French teacher’s mother when she was asked what was for supper.

  What’s for you won’t go by you. Friend’s family proverb.

  You’re bored? You should pee in your shoe and watch it go through. From a teacher whose parents didn’t think children should ever complain about being bored.

  Slowly, slowly the egg grows legs and learns to walk. Chinese friend’s family saying.

  Nursery rhymes are another essential element in learning to speak Story. Nursery rhymes come with their own sublime music and mystery. Even when they veer towards the nonsensical, they are memorable simply because they sing on our tongues. They also evoke countless hidden and untold stories. I recently asked a group at Queen’s University to respond to this traditional English rhyme:

  How many miles to Babylon?

  Three score miles and ten.

  Can I get there by candlelight?

  Yes, and back again.

  If your feet be nimble and light

  You can get there by candlelight.

  They all caught its evocative mood of night-time or dream journeys, but it was a seventy-year-old woman in the group who said, after a thoughtful silence, “That is the number of years of a person’s life.” She went on to say that what she’d learned in her own three-score-and-ten-year journey by candlelight was the necessity of keeping your feet “nimble and light,” that is, to be spontaneous and creative as you face whatever tragedies life throws your way. She’d caught the echo of one of the untold stories of this unforgettable rhyme.

  My own early experience of stories making a frame for everyday life came through hearing and reading tales of Hodja Nasrudin. Hodja Nasrudin rode into my life on my seventh birthday, via a book sent by our Turkish relatives. He was a short, round old man whose white beard should have made him look dignified but didn’t quite. He lived in the village of Ak Shahir and liked to ride through its streets on his exceedingly recalcitrant donkey, bestowing opinions, judgments and words of wisdom on his fellow citizens.

  Once, for example, the vi
llagers came to him and said, “Nasrudin, you are a ‘hodja,’ a learned teacher; tell us the answer to this deep philosophical question: if your house was on fire, God forbid, and you could only take one thing out, what would you take?” “I’d take out the fire,” said Hodja. Another time they came upon him contemplating the new moon, and asked, “Hodja, what happens to the old full moon?” “They cut it up,” he answered, “and crumble it to make stars.”

  Once he took his cat to the river, and began washing it in the water. The appalled villagers said, “Hodja, what do you think you’re doing? You’re going to kill your poor cat by washing it that way!”

  “I know how to wash cats,” he said, “trust me.”

  But sure enough, when they came back later, the cat was dead. “We told you you’d kill your cat!” they cried.

  Hodja Nasrudin was crying. “I know, I know,” he said, “I killed my own cat… But it wasn’t when I washed it; it was afterwards, when I tried to wring it out!”

  Even as a kid I noticed that, although Hodja usually had the last word, it was rarely the final say. His answers and responses tended to raise questions rather than settle them. I mostly didn’t get the punch-lines, but I did think Hodja was the silliest grown-up I’d ever come across. Even better, the stories have stayed in my head ever since. Long after he became my companion, I discovered that Hodja Nasrudin is one of the most famous Wise Fools of all oral literature. Stories about his lovable, exasperating, sublimely goofy exploits cross many borders. In the Middle East, tales of the Hodja are recounted by Muslims, Jews, Christians and Sufis. The thousands of stories told about Hodja (who is known by different names in different countries) make up a lexicon of wit and spiritual teaching.