Letter to the Editor

Tails and Trails: Shepherding the Story

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

EDITOR'S NOTE -- William "Bill" Kloefkorn was a Nebraska poet and educator and was appointed the State Poet of Nebraska. He died May 19. The Buffalo Commons Storytelling Festival will take place June 10 and 11 in McCook.

It was one of those balmy days in early summer when life bursts into full bloom. The music swayed and dos-i-doed around the old Norris Park band shell as Ruthie Ungar called, "Gather 'round!"

Under the canopy of an old elm, an eclectic group drew together, dissolved out again and spun a circle like pieces of a kaleidoscope.

My arm slid around my 8-year-old grandson's shoulder. We giggled as we twirled and skipped to the next outstretched hand. While we danced, Jay's old-time fiddle beckoned the harmonies of his family band and hand clapping from the crowd lazing in lawn chairs and on blankets spread over the grass.

A year earlier, I had been in the audience when Jay Ungar and Molly Mason mesmerized thousands at a Mark Twain Days concert on the Hartford, Connecticutt, courthouse square. The couple had won acclaim for their performance of Jay's haunting composition Ashokan Farewell when it became the musical hallmark of Ken Burns' PBS Civil War series.

But this day, this weekend, they were in McCook, Nebraska, with Jay's daughter Ruth and her fiancé Michael Merenda, making music and stirring memories at the Buffalo Commons Storytelling Festival.

I have been a part of the festival since its inception in 1997; however, it was during this 2002 event I realized that storytelling was much more than children's fairytales and a dance in the park.

The night before the Kids Fest and Band Shell Jamboree, my children and grandchildren were beside me in a row of red velvet seats at the Historic Fox Theatre, the same seats in which baby boomers gazed at newsreels of Armistice Day and savored a first kiss to strains of "Love Me Tender."

Nebraska's state poet Bill Kloefkorn was now bringing belly laughs running with his famous shrill hog calls. I remembered catching baby pigs with my cousins and making beds for them in pockets of hay in the loft of Granddad's Phelps County barn. And when the poet raised one thick, white eyebrow and recalled, "Near the sink in the kitchen with its gaudy wallpaper, it's curled linoleum, mother with a used bar of Lava stands ready to cleanse my mouth, . . . ," my memory takes me back to being five, near the scrubbed white kitchen sink in my family's temporary one-room quarters at an old hotel in Arco, Idaho. I was certain Mother would love the stray black cat I longed to make a pet, if he were clean enough, but just as I doused him with water and a dollop of lemony Richard Hudnut shampoo, he leapt from my hands, spreading suds and matted black hair across the oil clothed table to scratch and hiss on Mother's one polished window. At that moment, I thought, maybe "cleanliness was not next to godliness."

Kloefkorn's melodic deep voice transports us to the small-town cemetery where as a young man he had reluctantly driven his grandmother in his green Ford coupe. It was early March, and he recalled his German grandmother in her wide rosy-beige coat. "Just me and grandmother, Anna, rushing the season, placing a geranium above where grandfather already is, where grandmother is, she'll tell me later, about to be." I suddenly I find myself drifting to the country cemetery south of the Platte River near Elm Creek on the cold February day of my mother's funeral. Everyone has gathered in the church basement, but I see my son and daughter home from the Peace Corps standing in solitude with arms around each other watching the tractor push the dirt over my mother's grave. My daughter's long grey tweed coat billows in the wind while lacey snowflakes flutter and land, as if pulling up the covers as they say goodnight to Grandma Loraine for the final time.

Winter coats seemed to be a vivid image that night at the Fox as Barbara McBride-Smith, a regular at the National Storytelling Festival, described her mother's button box. "Mama saved buttons from old winter coats and birthday dresses. She had a button from Daddy's first uniform and another from Grandma's cloth coat--and every button in her button box came with a story."

As Barbara recounted in her sweet Texas drawl stories of her family's triumphs and tragedies during the Great Depression, I could hear my great-grandma Jane's Scottish brogue as she stretched out a newly crocheted necktie quilt or rag rug. Born in 1878, she said she was one of the first babies to arrive in Williamsburg Township. When she and my grandpa Henry were married, they lived in a sod house that was a popular spot for neighborhood gatherings. "The men would get the fiddles and accordions a goin' and one of the girls would play the piano. The floors of that ol' soddy were so smooth from all the dancin', they looked like they'd been hand waxed," she said.

But with the stock market crash and drought conditions on the farm, the dancing turned to Depression. "We'd lost about everything," she said, "but the 80 acres where we lived." One day in the mid-30s an insurance agent knocked on the door with foreclosure papers in hand. My feisty great-grandma, excused herself to the kitchen where she retrieved a straw broom. Flinging open the wooden screen door, with teeth clenched and broom raised high over her head, she chased him to his car. "You get off this place, and don't you ever show your face here again!" According to family lore, he never did. Thirty years later, her daughter-in-law, made the final payment on the home place, where my son lives and farms today. The rag rug containing pieces of the apron she wore the day she "saved the farm" is folded in my cedar chest.

I took my daughter's hand in mine. Tears ran into our own memories and connected her present to my past. That was the epiphany of the storytelling experience, but not the end of a magic entwining of community, family and hearts. It was the sheer beauty and grace of Jay's violin stirring the longings of my soul with "Ashokan Farewell" that made me realize that without story in song, in narrative, in poetry, in the moments we share with those we love, we lose a bit of ourselves. I know that when my two young children sat pushing their toy tractors through the corn stubble at the end of the field I was disking north of where my great-grandparents' sod house stood, they could hear the music because they knew the stories.

Linda Crandall,

McCook

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  • Memorable the words you say,

    May they last forever, not just a day.

    Memories in story or poets rhyme

    carry the day, most every time.

    Held too tightly, within the heart

    they oft go to grave, a heart part.

    Written on paper, or peoples ear

    Memories keep living, many a year.

    AMEN

    Thanks for an excellent read.

    -- Posted by Navyblue on Tue, May 31, 2011, at 3:21 PM
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