Wait and See

A few weeks ago Spot asked me if I could get the button out of her nose. I looked and looked, but never found a button. Hoping that she was mistaken about a button ever being up her nose is what I like to call “not over-reacting.” Then things started going wrong with my pregnancy, and I forgot all about the alleged button up her nose, and my plan to look for it again later that night.

Four days later I was making my bed upstairs, listening to the girls in the backyard through the open window. Their happy squeals as they jumped on the trampoline turned to tears (on Spot’s part) and protestations of innocence (on Susan’s part) and then I heard the sliding glass door open and close, rushed sobbing across the living room and up the stairs, and then she was in my arms, choking out a moving tale of bonked heads and owwie faces. Her eyes were streaming with tears, and so was her nose.

A smallish pink button slid right out on a trail of snot, and I was cheered in the midst of sorrow.

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We’re born loving stories. When I was a kid we couldn’t watch regular tv or movies on Sunday, so we watched old home videos, windy tapes my dad took while driving down the highway in Okinawa during his six-month tour there, windy tapes of us at the Oakland temple with the Meyers, windy tapes of me singing into Grandma Belle’s four-footed cane. When I got older we watched the Hank movie over and over, with Mom doing her wheeze-laugh that she can’t stop and Marcy and Brad discovering they’re not meant for the Actor’s Studio, and me yelling at Ryan (and Mom) to please take it more seriously, I have to reply to my prom invitation sometime this year. Two of my good friends are on that tape too, but then they were almost part of the family.

I read blogs for the stories, I watch movies for the stories, and I read my favorite books over and over for the stories. In Dead Poet’s Society (I don’t know if I’d remember this, but someone printed it out and put it with the New Eras from 1987 in the downstairs bathroom reading material at my mom’s house), Professor Keating says (insert “stories” for “poetry”):

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer. That you are here – that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

We need stories like we need water, food, and shelter. More than we need clothes. Except in winter, maybe.

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The Timpanogos Storytelling Festival is this weekend. Actually it starts on September 3rd (Thursday). It’s my first festival and I can’t wait. Mr. Bennet and I are getting a babysitter, and we’re going to get inspired and moved and motivated and filled up on stories. I know about it this year (their 20th anniversary) because I went to an event put on by Cherish Bound a few months ago. It was a fabulous evening, and if you ever have a chance to hear Wendy Gourley tell a story, it’s worth a missed appointment with George Clooney. (Okay, maybe not really George Clooney, but Wendy is such a storyteller that maybe she’ll be my answer when people ask, “Who would you love to have dinner with someday?”)

Cherish Bound gave us gift certificates to make story books. I was excited, because I’ve wanted to make a book out of my family-centered blog posts ever since Tara did a blurb book. But I’ll be honest with you: you need more patience than I have to get their software to work for you, but that probably says more about me than it does about Cherish Bound, because I am not known for my computer-related patience. (Please ignore Sally piping up that I’m not patient about other things too.)

I love the idea behind Cherish Bound — that creating, preserving, publishing our stories is of utmost importance. Amen. That whole “picture is worth a thousand words” has always bothered me just a little because I’m a slightly more competent storyteller than photographer, and usually I feel like if I could only express it right, my words should be able to say more than a photo, especially if I’m recording that Susan refers to a recent trip I took as “when you went to San Francisco to get our presents.” How do you get that certainty of center-of-the-universe-ness in a photograph?

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Moral of the story: Go to the Timpanogos Storytelling Festival if you’re in Utah, write and create your personal stories (for yourself, your children, and you country), and never assume a child doesn’t know what she’s talking about if she comes to you with a tale of a button up her nose.