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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels November 12, 2004 I'll Shut Up - Right After This Stories of life must be cherished John Darling Is there any job like being a journalist? I don't think so. People often say "hi" and "good story," then tell me or e-mail me another story. Or about someone who has a story. All day long, interrupted only by hikes, driving kids around, making meals, I sit and listen to people's stories. "It beats working," I say, when people ask me about the "work." That might be the definition of finding your calling, your perfect work - that it's not work. I often have no idea of what to write about here, but just sit at the keyboard and say to some god of writing (Hermes?), go ahead, write it, let it flow. And the finger-painted canvas, the mandala of the week's stories begins to spin out the threads, all of them having the common color and fiber that these are all people who've told me their heart - maybe have focused on it, crystallized it more than at any time in the year or their entire lives, because, well, how often does someone sit in front of you and write down everything you say, to be told to everyone you know? It's an archetypal work, one of the few left in our society that can be traced into the pre-civilized shadows of time. In Alex Haley's "Roots," the job title was griot - storyteller, perpetuator of the clan's myths, adventures, those who acted out its tragedies, those heroes who carried its visions and values. It's a job granted me genetically by a journalist father and grandfathers, who had me typing stories before I could write longhand. And before I could type (and before the copying machine), I would bring books home from the library and beg my father to type them for me. And he did. It was a ritual, a sacrifice he did to imprint me with the love, meaning and magic of words, stories. When I read obituaries, the world kind of stops. Here is a person's whole life in three or six inches of copy. She came from Kansas, married Joe in Idaho, had kids, Jim and Carol, farmed, taught grade school, came to the Rogue Valley in the Depression, maybe to work the orchards and forests, loved to fish and camp. The first thing I wonder is - did she get to tell her story? Did anyone write it down? Did they read it over her coffin, with the candles going and everyone - or at least the griot - committing it to memory, so that it would be told centuries from now (and called myth)? When my mother was 80, I begged her to write her story. I'd already taped it, written all the genealogy, but I wanted it in her handwriting. She resisted - not proper to talk about yourself so much. Those were the values of the early 20th century. But she started. She got through her childhood and said, it's just too hard to remember all those things. Hard to recall, said I, or hard to ... She nodded, holding back tears. Hard to feel it all again. So much happened. So many people, so much ... she touched her heart. It was like that moment in Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," when the dead girl gets to revisit life, her home, her parents, all the people, for one day and realizes it was not the big things that imprinted, moved, changed her, shaped her soul. It was every little thing, the sound of the silver in the drawer, the casual fussing over the way she dressed, the way the front door slammed, the sound of the horse's hooves delivering milk - it would tear your soul apart if you could really let it all come in for just one moment. I read what she wrote and realized she stopped just short of meeting my father - an ill-starred mismatch ("The Genius and the Goddess," an Aldous Huxley title that captures it), she a 19-year old Canadian beauty, he older, a writer, mysterious, aloof, come on a Great Lakes ship to meet her at a resort hotel dance. But at some point, they loved and had all the hopes of the world ahead of them. Even if it were just for a year, each moment of that year contained the universe compressed in it. I wanted to tell her, but wouldn't, that this moment, if she could touch it and speak it, would contain the novel, the myth, the understanding that the world has always wanted to read - and out of it came these children and all they've said, done, thought, longed to be and know and do. Her story died with her. But I felt it and know it and have passed it on. Five centuries from now, sitting in the university library, someone will read this on microfilm and mention it to her lover over wine. A tear will be wiped away. It will change the way they love. Story. Underneath every story, the words, plot, characters, is the true story, the heart's story. That's what the griot hears and that's how, with drum, chant, face paint, waving arms, tears, prancing, barking, nostrils flaring, he's able to open the heart of story - and somehow direct the soul of the tribe. John Darling is an Ashland writer and counselor. DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Click Here Site Search: .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - Mail Tribune News - ODOT Road Cams