My mother dearly wanted me to become a competent enough keyboardist to play duets, I on the piano, she on the Hammond organ. By the time I was ten years old I had met and vanquished in glorious musical conflict seven little-old-lady piano teachers. They would come, some for weeks, some for months, brandishing their despicable books of scales and finger exercises which I would passively resist practicing until they gave up on me. I liked playing the piano; I just hated practicing pieces that didn’t sound like music to me.
My mother met Dave in a cocktail lounge and restaurant near our home and was impressed with his musical expertise at the piano. I don’t know how many cocktails she had imbibed or how hard pressed he was for money, but somehow she talked him into coming to our house and giving her electric organ lessons and me piano lessons. He told her in advance, “I don’t give lessons to children” but my mother insisted he give it a try.
Dave was built like a six-foot tall bear with a mole-like face. His pointy nose was centered between a high receding hairline of gray and floppy jowls. He had tiny, squinty eyes that he occasionally magnified with thick, black-rimmed glasses. He smelled musty and he had a deep, growly voice. But what totally undid me were his huge hands. They were old so the veins and tendons and knuckles were prominent but on his right hand he had the same ring as the vampire on my favorite television show of the time, Dark Shadows. Only someone who had made deals with the undead would have a ring like that and I was terrified. He told me to “play something” so he could get a feel for my abilities and I nervously started to pick out the first thing that came to mind until I made a mistake and he said in deep, sepulchral tones “No, that’s not right.” Sad to say, I did not take correction well so I burst into tears.
Dave leapt up as if my tears were made of acid, all the color drained from his already pasty complexion, and his limbs began to tremble. He snatched up the briefcase he had brought and fled down the hallway where my mother intercepted him at the door. I could hear her trying to placate the terrified man. I could hear him insisting that he was incapable of teaching little girls in pony-tails who cried when corrected. I did not hear how my mother convinced him to return another day but I can only suspect that generous sums of money were negotiated. Dave must have been hard-pressed for cash to pull himself together and face his greatest fear: the manipulative, passive-aggressive, spoiled little girl.
Music lessons with Dave – take two. This time he had me sit on the bar stool about two feet away as he sat at the piano. He asked me what kind of music I liked. I mumbled the sort of thing a ten-year-old would. So he played some jazz. Did I like that? “S’okay.” He played some classical, some rock, some ragtime, and then he did several of his lounge tunes. When he played his “standards” he would hum in this deep growly way to himself as he played. I could see what had impressed my mother: when Dave played the music was alive. He asked me, “What’s a song that you like to listen to?” I told him and the next week Dave came with an extremely simplified arrangement of the song I had mentioned. No finger exercises, no scales, just, “You know this song. Let’s figure out how you can play it.”
Dave came to my house every Thursday for the next eight years. I got used to his rings, and his smell, and his hot breath on the top of my head as he’d reach around to show me some intricate fingering or rhythmic pattern. I never got used to the fact that he’d do his growl/hum while I played. When I asked him about it he was unaware that he was even doing it. But Dave succeeded where the other music teachers had failed because he let me learn what I was interested in learning. He wanted me to love music, and to play the music I loved, and he empowered me to have a musical opinion and the technique to express it.
When I was twelve, Dave started introducing me to new genres of music. He’d come with a cassette tape of music he had compiled from his “collection” and have me listen to new musical artists in every musical style that existed. If I liked something, that sheet music would show up with the next lesson. I put in half an hour of practice before leaving for school in the morning and usually a half-hour of practice before or after dinner. As the years went by Dave introduced finger exercises only as they were needed for me to master the piece on which I was working. As I tackled new pieces that required understanding music theory, Dave would provide me with the necessary reading and charts.
By the time I was fourteen, Mom and I could play our organ-piano duets and she stopped taking lessons with Dave. It was then that he said I had to make a choice. “Do you want to be a piano player or a pianist? Do you want to play for your own enjoyment or do you want to play for performance? I can guide you either way but your choice will affect how much you practice and what kind of training I put you through.” I did not see a future for myself in “serious music” but I did enjoy the instrument and wanted to keep playing.
Every Thursday for the next four years Dave would unpack his briefcase with excitement, “Look what I’ve got for you this week, my musical child!” He would pull out rare recordings, antique folios, clippings about musicians and performances. I would have my own collection of show and tell for him. “Did you hear this on the radio? How do they get that sound? Wait, I’ve got their latest album, listen to track 8, and tell me is that in 5/8 time?” Whenever I asked Dave about his work or his career as a musician, he would refuse to discuss much with me, almost as if he was embarrassed. Every now and then while we were talking about performers and pieces he would let slip that he had played with someone famous. When pressed for more information he’d mumble about “poor choices, tough breaks” and go back to talking about the music on the music stand.
By the time I was eighteen I could jerkily finger my way through Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” It was the most complicated piece I ever got through on the piano and the height of my piano prowess. As the years would go by, lack of practice would diminish my skills but not my ability to appreciate music, all kinds of music, from all parts of the world. Music has added a richness and depth to every aspect of my life that I would have lacked if Dave had not persevered with me and allowed our lessons to be “delight-driven.”
I went away to college but Dave and I kept up the musical exchange through letters every season. He would always include a new cassette of something that “blew his mind” when he heard it, and I would tell him about what concerts I had gone to or what musical tastes my roommates had. When I took a class in Beethoven and was struggling for a topic on which to write my research paper, I wrote to Dave for advice. He sent me back a recording and pages and pages of notes on the Diabelli Variations. “Nobody thinks to do these – your professor will be thrilled.” Dave was right and he had provided exactly the resources I needed.
By the time I was 21, I had my own car and I decided one summer vacation to drive the 40 minutes to Dave’s house and visit him. He was retired, growing very paunchy, having all kinds of diabetes-related health issues. I had never been to his little seaside house before and I was totally shocked to discover that he had a wife and apparently grown children. He had never mentioned them in all those years of piano lessons. His wife didn’t look too thrilled to see the 21-year-old with the waist long hair being greeted by her husband and taken back to see his “collection.” An additional room built onto the house was filled from floor to ceiling along every wall with vinyl albums. In the center of the room was a “state of the art” recording set-up with his baby grand and his electric piano. Radio stations had smaller libraries than Dave. We spent the day just listening to one “cool thing” after another. His wife brought us, grudgingly, some sandwiches and iced tea. I tried to ask about her and his children but all Dave would say was, “They’re not interested in my collection.” Was that why he called me his musical child?
The next summer I took my fiancé to meet Dave. Back to the collection we went, and we spent the day talking about music. My fiancé was a piano player and had very eclectic musical tastes. Dave approved, and wanted us to come back and visit him more often. My wedding the next summer was a small, private ceremony and I wrote to Dave afterwards to let him know I was now married and living in Bakersfield. I told him about joining a hand bell choir with our church and he sent me several cassettes of his favorite church choir music. We had never discussed God so I had no idea what his views on spiritual life might have been. I wrote to him about my parents letting me have the piano for my own when we moved into our first rental house. He sent me a cassette of the musical “Chess” with lyrics by Tim Rice and music by the guys from ABBA but there was no note in Dave’s distinctive, spidery, block lettering accompanying it.
Sometime while we were still in the rental house, a postcard from his wife arrived stating that Dave had died, he had valued our friendship, and please don’t write any more. I looked around at the hundreds of cassettes he had recorded for me over the years, the shelves of sheet music he had given me aligned beside the piano. I wondered what his wife had done with Dave’s vinyl records which, while obsolete, represented a fortune from a music collector’s standpoint. I wondered if he had left as much of a legacy to his own children as he had to his musical child. I think Dave would have approved of all the different types of music I exposed my children to during the years I gave them piano lessons. I think he would enjoy talking with my son, the drummer, about bands, and cover tunes, and rhythms. If we’re not gone until we’re forgotten then Dave is as vibrantly alive as was his music.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Acting Responsibly
I have always loved theater performances, whether I was in the audience or acting on the stage. I was, however, typecast at a young age. My kindergarten teacher cast me in the role of Mother Goose for our class play which recreated a number of the well-known tales. I thought it might be because she recognized the “old soul” storyteller within me. She told my mother it was because I was the only child responsible enough to leave on stage for the full duration of the play.
What followed through my grade school years were a series of roles in school plays that bore a striking similarity: mothers, teachers, judges, librarians, soothsayers. In real life I’ll admit I was the goody-two-shoes, the brainiac, the teacher’s pet, the crossing guard, the Hermione to everybody’s else’s Harry Potter. But I wanted to stretch my acting skills, explore my alter-ego “bad girl,” and play the vamp, the tramp, the biker chick. What I got to do was perform in the Mark Hopkins’ Hotel lobby in San Francisco at a dental convention playing Wanda Pick, trusty secretary to the detective Brush Floss who was out to rid the world of decay in “The Great Cavity Caper.”
My only starring role was that of Little Mary Sunshine in the play of the same name. I was pure, I was sweet, I was obviously going to need Captain Jim to save me from a dastardly fate. The fact that Captain Jim missed his mark so that instead of kissing my finger and putting it to his lips (our hot love scene) I kissed my finger and rammed it up his nostril was not my fault!
I wondered if I should pursue the theater arts as the venue for my storytelling skills. I was trying to become one of the “drama club gang” when I was cast in my final school play as the plucky comic sidekick to the heroine in “The Bookshop Mystery.” My character was supposed to be loyal and clever but clutzy. As an 8th grader I had the clutzy down and did twice as many pratfalls as the script called for simply because I kept tripping over props and stumbling during my entrances. I had a crush on the guy playing the hero of the play and after our performance run was over I approached him one day to flirt with him. He commented, “We’re not in a play together anymore so I don’t have to be nice to you.” I never became a drama major.
Thirty years later I was a stage mother. My life path had intersected with that of a drama director for a church’s youth ministry and I thought my daughter should have the chance to see if theater arts was something in which she excelled. I tried not to shout stage instructions at her and instead focused on driving her to rehearsals and working on my bible study in the back of the sanctuary while she worked through her drama exercises with the rest of the students on stage.
In her first play she was cast as the principal of a high school, although she was only a 7th grader and smaller than all the other members of the drama group. Her second play she had the role of the plucky comic sidekick to the heroine. Her third play was entitled, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place” and it was a dramatic retelling of the gospel story, staged in the 1920’s prohibition era of U.S. history. Instead of the Sanhedrin, Jesus was up against mob bosses. Instead of the woman taken in adultery there was the mob boss’s moll. Jesus was pulling disciples out of a cross-section of flappers and dapper dans of the late 1920’s, early 1930’s. Instead of a Roman centurion supervising Jesus’ crucifixion there was a hitman and a lackey whose stage directions included shooting and stabbing Jesus.
As the results of the auditions were being read I kept expecting my daughter to be cast as one of the disciples or even as the moll. When her name was read as the lackey I felt compelled to ask the director why she had cast my daughter, the second smallest person in the cast, as a murderous thug. The director replied, “You see the kids I have to work with . . . your daughter was the only one I’d trust to handle a stiletto and a prop gun back stage.”
Do all youth drama directors make assignments based on student responsibility over talent? Are the conscientious kids who memorize their lines and remember their marks doomed to always be the nannies and nuns and knights? The months of rehearsal for that play were agony for both my daughter and myself because she had one spotlight moment in which she gave her line and then delivered the death blow that kills Jesus. She was supposed to represent all the repressed resentment toward the Jewish people held by Roman soldiers posted to Jerusalem in the late A.D. 20’s, early 30’s. But every time in rehearsal that she said, “You people make me so sick!” and went to stab the long-haired darling of the drama group who was cast as Jesus, she got the giggles. Or she tickled him and he got the giggles. Or she squeaked or mumbled or spoke calmly as if she were politely pointing out he had a smudge on his nose. The director coached her publicly. I coached her privately. Instead of the cautious, polite, respectful girl that she was she had to act like an angry, vengeful, assassin.
The show opened and I was there with friends and family in the audience and my daughter delivered her line amidst technical difficulties of the lighting and gun-shot effects. Her line was correct and well-projected but you just didn’t believe that the little girl in the oversized zoot suit meant to murder the Son of God. It was more like accidental manslaughter.
I alone went with my daughter to the final night’s performance. I had been through this play dozens of times and was just glad to be at the end of it. Unbeknownst to me, the Jesus of the cast was equally disenchanted with the production and led the kids backstage in the kind of unruly behavior teenage boys are famous for when unsupervised. My daughter just wanted to get through the play and was disgusted and angered by the general idiocy.
So I’m in the pews of the church, watching the dramatic finale with my usual apprehension. The lighting changes, Jesus gets shot in one hand, then the other hand, and now my daughter is approaching in a threatening manner. But instead of her little girl voice, she summons all the annoyance and frustration she’s held toward the actor for his highjinks backstage and roars, “You people make me . . . so. . . SICK!” Then she shanks him for all she’s worth. The moment is so convincing, so dramatic, that the audience gasps in horror.
Then this woman’s voice rings out, “YES! That’s how you do it.” It’s only when all the nice church people turn to stare with revulsion at the woman who’s so pleased to see the Savior of the World snuffed that I realize the exclamation has burst out of me.
I guess it’s easier to act responsibly on stage than it is in real life.
What followed through my grade school years were a series of roles in school plays that bore a striking similarity: mothers, teachers, judges, librarians, soothsayers. In real life I’ll admit I was the goody-two-shoes, the brainiac, the teacher’s pet, the crossing guard, the Hermione to everybody’s else’s Harry Potter. But I wanted to stretch my acting skills, explore my alter-ego “bad girl,” and play the vamp, the tramp, the biker chick. What I got to do was perform in the Mark Hopkins’ Hotel lobby in San Francisco at a dental convention playing Wanda Pick, trusty secretary to the detective Brush Floss who was out to rid the world of decay in “The Great Cavity Caper.”
My only starring role was that of Little Mary Sunshine in the play of the same name. I was pure, I was sweet, I was obviously going to need Captain Jim to save me from a dastardly fate. The fact that Captain Jim missed his mark so that instead of kissing my finger and putting it to his lips (our hot love scene) I kissed my finger and rammed it up his nostril was not my fault!
I wondered if I should pursue the theater arts as the venue for my storytelling skills. I was trying to become one of the “drama club gang” when I was cast in my final school play as the plucky comic sidekick to the heroine in “The Bookshop Mystery.” My character was supposed to be loyal and clever but clutzy. As an 8th grader I had the clutzy down and did twice as many pratfalls as the script called for simply because I kept tripping over props and stumbling during my entrances. I had a crush on the guy playing the hero of the play and after our performance run was over I approached him one day to flirt with him. He commented, “We’re not in a play together anymore so I don’t have to be nice to you.” I never became a drama major.
Thirty years later I was a stage mother. My life path had intersected with that of a drama director for a church’s youth ministry and I thought my daughter should have the chance to see if theater arts was something in which she excelled. I tried not to shout stage instructions at her and instead focused on driving her to rehearsals and working on my bible study in the back of the sanctuary while she worked through her drama exercises with the rest of the students on stage.
In her first play she was cast as the principal of a high school, although she was only a 7th grader and smaller than all the other members of the drama group. Her second play she had the role of the plucky comic sidekick to the heroine. Her third play was entitled, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place” and it was a dramatic retelling of the gospel story, staged in the 1920’s prohibition era of U.S. history. Instead of the Sanhedrin, Jesus was up against mob bosses. Instead of the woman taken in adultery there was the mob boss’s moll. Jesus was pulling disciples out of a cross-section of flappers and dapper dans of the late 1920’s, early 1930’s. Instead of a Roman centurion supervising Jesus’ crucifixion there was a hitman and a lackey whose stage directions included shooting and stabbing Jesus.
As the results of the auditions were being read I kept expecting my daughter to be cast as one of the disciples or even as the moll. When her name was read as the lackey I felt compelled to ask the director why she had cast my daughter, the second smallest person in the cast, as a murderous thug. The director replied, “You see the kids I have to work with . . . your daughter was the only one I’d trust to handle a stiletto and a prop gun back stage.”
Do all youth drama directors make assignments based on student responsibility over talent? Are the conscientious kids who memorize their lines and remember their marks doomed to always be the nannies and nuns and knights? The months of rehearsal for that play were agony for both my daughter and myself because she had one spotlight moment in which she gave her line and then delivered the death blow that kills Jesus. She was supposed to represent all the repressed resentment toward the Jewish people held by Roman soldiers posted to Jerusalem in the late A.D. 20’s, early 30’s. But every time in rehearsal that she said, “You people make me so sick!” and went to stab the long-haired darling of the drama group who was cast as Jesus, she got the giggles. Or she tickled him and he got the giggles. Or she squeaked or mumbled or spoke calmly as if she were politely pointing out he had a smudge on his nose. The director coached her publicly. I coached her privately. Instead of the cautious, polite, respectful girl that she was she had to act like an angry, vengeful, assassin.
The show opened and I was there with friends and family in the audience and my daughter delivered her line amidst technical difficulties of the lighting and gun-shot effects. Her line was correct and well-projected but you just didn’t believe that the little girl in the oversized zoot suit meant to murder the Son of God. It was more like accidental manslaughter.
I alone went with my daughter to the final night’s performance. I had been through this play dozens of times and was just glad to be at the end of it. Unbeknownst to me, the Jesus of the cast was equally disenchanted with the production and led the kids backstage in the kind of unruly behavior teenage boys are famous for when unsupervised. My daughter just wanted to get through the play and was disgusted and angered by the general idiocy.
So I’m in the pews of the church, watching the dramatic finale with my usual apprehension. The lighting changes, Jesus gets shot in one hand, then the other hand, and now my daughter is approaching in a threatening manner. But instead of her little girl voice, she summons all the annoyance and frustration she’s held toward the actor for his highjinks backstage and roars, “You people make me . . . so. . . SICK!” Then she shanks him for all she’s worth. The moment is so convincing, so dramatic, that the audience gasps in horror.
Then this woman’s voice rings out, “YES! That’s how you do it.” It’s only when all the nice church people turn to stare with revulsion at the woman who’s so pleased to see the Savior of the World snuffed that I realize the exclamation has burst out of me.
I guess it’s easier to act responsibly on stage than it is in real life.
Friday, April 16, 2010
The Way of an Eagle
I am 17 years old, riding on the interior engine cover of a 28-foot motorhome, strategically situated between my father, the driver, and my mother, the passenger. We are on a summer vacation driving through Canada and Alaska and we have left our campsite beside a huge lake. All morning we had been watching Bald Eagles fishing for salmon.
Proverbs 30:18-19 list at the top of things that awe and amaze “the way of an eagle in the sky.” It was fascinating and mysterious how these birds could come shooting down from their piney treetops at speeds of 40 miles per hour to glide over the surface of the lake and then reach forward with their talons and snatch a fish. The fish would wriggle for all it was worth in protest of its alien abduction. The eagles knew to aim their catch aerodynamically in the direction they were flying and would return to their treetops to enjoy their sushi with no other utensils than their beak and claws.
But envision if you will that we have left the lake and are making our ascent up a gravel road that winds along the mountainside. The lake is miles below us to the right and my mother is whimpering about there being no guard rail along her side of the roadway. My father is concentrating on not pulling up too close to the cloud of dust being kicked up by a small, white pickup truck about five car-lengths ahead of us. I notice there is a large, young eagle atop a lightning-blasted tree up on the hillside to our left. I know he’s young because his plumage hasn’t changed from all brown to the distinctive dark body with white head plumage. This eagle is picking at the remains of a fairly large fish and as the white pickup truck approaches, the noise and dust cloud disturb the bird and he decides to take the rest of his lunch somewhere else.
The eagle takes off but his fish is not the nice, tight package it had been when he had flown up here this far from the lake. The bird of prey barely gets a couple of wing flaps in before he starts to tilt and dip while his claws juggle and snatch and grab at the meaty mess of his half-eaten salmon. The eagle tries vainly to gain altitude but the salmon slips from his grasp. The eagle practically snaps his talons in frustration then dives down towards the lake for something new to eat.
Meanwhile the fish is falling, flopping, spinning in the air. My parents and I have a perfect view of it as gravity brings it down. The fish carcass lands directly on the windshield of the white pickup and explodes across it in a spray of blood and guts worthy of a Peckinpah film. The remaining spinal column of the fish bounces off and sails over the side of the road.
The truck screeches to a halt and out of the driver’s side tumbles a young man in his early twenties dressed like someone from a construction site job. He is wide-eyed, frenzied, running around to the front of his truck to take in the scope of the blood smear, looking at the front grill, looking under the truck for a body. Nothing. He runs around to the back, looks under, looks around, looks up at the sky.
We slow down and pull to a stop behind his truck and he runs over to my mother’s window and bellows, “What was it? WHAT WAS IT?”
My mother points to the sky and shouts, “An eagle! An eagle!”
The young man claps his hand to his forehead and exclaims with relief, “Thank God! I thought it was a fish!”
Proverbs 30:18-19 list at the top of things that awe and amaze “the way of an eagle in the sky.” It was fascinating and mysterious how these birds could come shooting down from their piney treetops at speeds of 40 miles per hour to glide over the surface of the lake and then reach forward with their talons and snatch a fish. The fish would wriggle for all it was worth in protest of its alien abduction. The eagles knew to aim their catch aerodynamically in the direction they were flying and would return to their treetops to enjoy their sushi with no other utensils than their beak and claws.
But envision if you will that we have left the lake and are making our ascent up a gravel road that winds along the mountainside. The lake is miles below us to the right and my mother is whimpering about there being no guard rail along her side of the roadway. My father is concentrating on not pulling up too close to the cloud of dust being kicked up by a small, white pickup truck about five car-lengths ahead of us. I notice there is a large, young eagle atop a lightning-blasted tree up on the hillside to our left. I know he’s young because his plumage hasn’t changed from all brown to the distinctive dark body with white head plumage. This eagle is picking at the remains of a fairly large fish and as the white pickup truck approaches, the noise and dust cloud disturb the bird and he decides to take the rest of his lunch somewhere else.
The eagle takes off but his fish is not the nice, tight package it had been when he had flown up here this far from the lake. The bird of prey barely gets a couple of wing flaps in before he starts to tilt and dip while his claws juggle and snatch and grab at the meaty mess of his half-eaten salmon. The eagle tries vainly to gain altitude but the salmon slips from his grasp. The eagle practically snaps his talons in frustration then dives down towards the lake for something new to eat.
Meanwhile the fish is falling, flopping, spinning in the air. My parents and I have a perfect view of it as gravity brings it down. The fish carcass lands directly on the windshield of the white pickup and explodes across it in a spray of blood and guts worthy of a Peckinpah film. The remaining spinal column of the fish bounces off and sails over the side of the road.
The truck screeches to a halt and out of the driver’s side tumbles a young man in his early twenties dressed like someone from a construction site job. He is wide-eyed, frenzied, running around to the front of his truck to take in the scope of the blood smear, looking at the front grill, looking under the truck for a body. Nothing. He runs around to the back, looks under, looks around, looks up at the sky.
We slow down and pull to a stop behind his truck and he runs over to my mother’s window and bellows, “What was it? WHAT WAS IT?”
My mother points to the sky and shouts, “An eagle! An eagle!”
The young man claps his hand to his forehead and exclaims with relief, “Thank God! I thought it was a fish!”
Friday, April 2, 2010
For the Love of Story
My parents have a reel-to-reel audio tape recording made when I was three years old. On it you can hear my mother ask me what I had done that day. There follows fifteen minutes of non-stop, rapid-fire, description of my meeting Timothy the Turtle and the riveting adventure, replete with suspense, pathos, and humor that ensued. Despite the childish patois and the squeaky little girl voice, my vocabulary was disturbingly advanced for my age. Even without visuals, you can hear as the drama unfolds that I had to be waving my arms around as I spoke and making the exaggerated facial expressions appropriate to the drama. When I finally came to a halt, all my mother said into the recorder was, “As you can hear, she’s quite the little storyteller.”
My sweetest childhood memories involve my mother sitting beside me on the living room couch and reading aloud to me. She had joined the Dr. Seuss Book Club and twice a month a beginning reader would arrive in the mail. I have deep, instinctive reactions to phrases like “green eggs and ham” or “go, dog, go” or “a person’s a person no matter how small.” I loved that letters made words, and words told stories. By the time I was five I was reading the Dr. Seuss book collection aloud to my mother while she made dinner.
My kindergarten teacher was pretty harried the day it was her turn to introduce her class to the school library. Most of the children just wanted to run around the book cases. I sat in a corner, pulling down one book after another, marveling that there were so many I had never seen before. When the teacher told the class to line up for our return to class I began to cry. The librarian came up and asked me why I was upset and I said it was because I had not had the chance to read all the books yet. She told me that I could check out several of them, take them home, and read them when I had the time – just so long as I brought them back next week. Then I could check out more. My face lit up and I cried with joy, “You mean I can read as many of these books as I WANT?” The librarian got all misty-eyed and the whole class had to wait restlessly while I procured my first library card and checked out my first armload of picture books. Here was a world of stories to explore.
My fourth grade teacher showed us a short movie about black bears and then asked us to imagine we were a bear cub and write down a short story. Twenty minutes later I was on page five, scribbling furiously in my loopy, illegible handwriting and the teacher said, “It’s time to go to recess.” “Don’t want to play outside,” I said, “I have to finish the story.” At the next parent-teacher conference she suggested that I be steered towards a career in writing. Every scholastic choice I made after that was aimed at my becoming a professional storyteller. I wound up a communications major in college with a minor in film studies because I couldn’t decide which medium to tell stories with: film, radio, or print.
When I was twenty-four I joined a Bible Study Fellowship class and discovered the one true story that makes all other stories worthwhile. At twenty-eight I started sharing that “greatest story ever told” to two-year-olds and knew I had found my true calling. At thirty-seven I was asked to start teaching the Bible to adult women. I was sent to Bible Study Fellowship International’s headquarters for training and in a “getting to know you” session we were each supposed to share something special about ourselves. Some candidates were active in sports, others in the arts, others had rare hobbies and when it came my turn I said, “I’m a storyteller.” To which, the executive director sternly said, “We teach the Bible, we don’t tell stories.” I figured they’d put me on the next plane home but I survived the week’s barrage of tests and returned home to teach the Bible – by telling stories.
In the story of my life I am now fifty years told. To commemorate that half-century mark I have begun a blog, DeVera Words, in which I present words De Vera (of truth) in a manner as if “I took de verra words right outta me mouth.” These are true stories that have been a part of my life and I have reached a limit to my storage capacity so that they must come spilling out. In college I would be writing page after page of single-spaced typewritten description in letter form to my parents. My roommate would say, “What could you possibly be writing about since nothing happened to us this week?” Then I would read aloud to her the adventures of her past week. She'd say “Everything’s a story to you, isn’t it?”
Read the blog and see.
My sweetest childhood memories involve my mother sitting beside me on the living room couch and reading aloud to me. She had joined the Dr. Seuss Book Club and twice a month a beginning reader would arrive in the mail. I have deep, instinctive reactions to phrases like “green eggs and ham” or “go, dog, go” or “a person’s a person no matter how small.” I loved that letters made words, and words told stories. By the time I was five I was reading the Dr. Seuss book collection aloud to my mother while she made dinner.
My kindergarten teacher was pretty harried the day it was her turn to introduce her class to the school library. Most of the children just wanted to run around the book cases. I sat in a corner, pulling down one book after another, marveling that there were so many I had never seen before. When the teacher told the class to line up for our return to class I began to cry. The librarian came up and asked me why I was upset and I said it was because I had not had the chance to read all the books yet. She told me that I could check out several of them, take them home, and read them when I had the time – just so long as I brought them back next week. Then I could check out more. My face lit up and I cried with joy, “You mean I can read as many of these books as I WANT?” The librarian got all misty-eyed and the whole class had to wait restlessly while I procured my first library card and checked out my first armload of picture books. Here was a world of stories to explore.
My fourth grade teacher showed us a short movie about black bears and then asked us to imagine we were a bear cub and write down a short story. Twenty minutes later I was on page five, scribbling furiously in my loopy, illegible handwriting and the teacher said, “It’s time to go to recess.” “Don’t want to play outside,” I said, “I have to finish the story.” At the next parent-teacher conference she suggested that I be steered towards a career in writing. Every scholastic choice I made after that was aimed at my becoming a professional storyteller. I wound up a communications major in college with a minor in film studies because I couldn’t decide which medium to tell stories with: film, radio, or print.
When I was twenty-four I joined a Bible Study Fellowship class and discovered the one true story that makes all other stories worthwhile. At twenty-eight I started sharing that “greatest story ever told” to two-year-olds and knew I had found my true calling. At thirty-seven I was asked to start teaching the Bible to adult women. I was sent to Bible Study Fellowship International’s headquarters for training and in a “getting to know you” session we were each supposed to share something special about ourselves. Some candidates were active in sports, others in the arts, others had rare hobbies and when it came my turn I said, “I’m a storyteller.” To which, the executive director sternly said, “We teach the Bible, we don’t tell stories.” I figured they’d put me on the next plane home but I survived the week’s barrage of tests and returned home to teach the Bible – by telling stories.
In the story of my life I am now fifty years told. To commemorate that half-century mark I have begun a blog, DeVera Words, in which I present words De Vera (of truth) in a manner as if “I took de verra words right outta me mouth.” These are true stories that have been a part of my life and I have reached a limit to my storage capacity so that they must come spilling out. In college I would be writing page after page of single-spaced typewritten description in letter form to my parents. My roommate would say, “What could you possibly be writing about since nothing happened to us this week?” Then I would read aloud to her the adventures of her past week. She'd say “Everything’s a story to you, isn’t it?”
Read the blog and see.
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