In One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty wrote: "Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole."
One time over a matter of a week, a couple of mice got into my house. For months and even years after, my cat, Luke, would sit by the place where the hole was stuffed, waiting for another one to come in. He never gave up.
As a kid, I was the cat watching for a mouse, the kid listening for a story. I remember sitting on my great aunt's lawn in McHenry, Kentucky. My younger siblings were playing elsewhere. But I was in one of those colorful metal chairs that's back looked like a tulip, my legs dangling. I was with the adults, waiting, listening. And those adults delivered with stories and reactions and a side helping of humor. The only thing that slowed them from telling stories was the whistle of a passing freight train, which they'd have to wait to pass in order to hear. Maybe that's why today I turn down the volume of the television when I hear a train in the distance. I've always thought it was about a restlessness, a desire to travel and be elsewhere. It might be in part. But perhaps I also connect the train's whistle to storytelling. Next time I hear a train, I'll pay better attention to what comes next. A story might jump off one of the cars.
No comments:
Post a Comment