February 11, 2014--Again Mommy, Again

Some years ago I listened in as my New Jersey sister-in-law read a story to her four-year-old daughter.

What struck me was not so much the story--I think a weasel was prominently featured--but the rapt attention my niece paid to it. Also, though she could not as yet read, she appeared to be mouthing all the words. Clearly she had heard the story before. Certainly, many times to be able to lip-sink it so seamlessly.

And then at the end, I was fascinated to hear her say, "Again, mommy, again." At which time her mother without a shrug or sigh, read it again. And again. And then again. By which time my niece was fighting to fend off sleep.

That contributed to my lifelong interest in stories. Not just my loving to listen to them, or telling them, or attempting to write them, but by the seemingly universal interest all peoples have in stories. More fundamentally, appear to need them. Perhaps particularly those they have heard before like my niece, many, many times.

Can you name one society, one culture, one tribe--pre-historic, ancient, or contemporary--that does not depend upon stories? Not just for pleasure, not just for tribal or communal bonding, but perhaps even for survival.

Because if stories are so ubiquitous in evolutionary terms they must be "adaptive," which means they are needed for species survival. Equally as important as food, language, music, belief systems (which all have stories at their heart), rituals, mores, and social arrangements.

If true, all humans have, actually must have the same propensity, the same, may I say, biological need for stories as my four-year-old New Jersey niece.

Some claim that we shape our sense of personhood by the stories we tell and exhibit about ourselves. We shape into stories experiences for the purpose of sculpting a Self. There is no Self possible, it is thought, if one does not do this. There is no reality about ourselves except that which we create in this story-generating way.

Since post-modernists assert that reality is socially constructed--and not discoverable in any absolute way and then passed along as Truth--to me a persuasive contention--this fits the notion that we each socially construct who we are. Stories are the warp and weft of that life-long effort.

My earliest experience with this transformative, self-building process--beyond the stories my mother must have read to me that I was too young to recall--were the accounts of adventures my Cousin Chuck pursued as much for the stories he made of them as the adventures themselves.

There was one time when he and I camped overnight in a state park in the Catskills. I was a cub scout and knew about making fires and pitching a tent. He knew about neither. In fact, he was the least out-of-doors-oriented person I knew. To him, the out-of-doors was the neighborhood schoolyard. But he insisted on going camping.

So my father drive us to the site, said his goodbyes, wished us well, and said he'd be back for us in the morning.

I pitched a tent by myself, having sent Chuck out to gather firewood. He asked if he could have my cub scout knife in case he needed to defend himself.

I told him there were no bears for at least 20 miles but to indulge him and to get him out of the way so I could pitch the tent without his interference, I gave him the knife.

He returned after 15 minutes with a few twigs and branches. Barely enough for me to heat up the baked beans and grill the hot dogs my mother had packed for us.

As only beans and frankfurters cooked and eaten in the woods can taste, we thoroughly enjoyed our dinner, scattered the embers, slid into our sleeping bags, and proceeded to sleep like proverbial logs.

My father arrived right on time and found us packed and ready to go.

On the way home, during that 45 minutes, Chuck, in response to my father asking how we did, told a story, created a story worthy of James Fenimore Cooper. How the evening began with his struggle to subdue a grizzly bear that had penetrated out campsite and attempted to steal our food and how, after driving the bear back into the woods, we were attacked by swarms of bats and later lay awake all night listening to the howls of a nearby wolf, Chuck ever on-guard, protecting me, his younger cousin, with his 12-inch Bolo knife.

And then when we got back to the house the family was renting, my Dad had him tell the story over and over again to assorted cousins and aunts and uncles who had gathered for the weekend.

By the fifth telling, every one of which I listened to and savored, the one bear had become three, the lone wolf had become a pack, and his knife had grown to 14 inches.

This story lives on in family lore though Chuck prematurely departed this life. It not only reflects the self Chuck constructed but also has helped define our larger family. In the alchemic possibilities of America (also largely created through a national narrative more fiction than fact), we transformed ourselves from shtetl Jews into full-blooded Americans. Eager to take on whatever came our way. To become who we wanted to be. To become how we defined ourselves largely through our shape-shifting stories.

This all reminds me of Woody Allen's joke at the end of Annie Hall--

A guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, "Hey doc, my bother's crazy. He thinks he's a chicken!" 

Then the doc says, "Why don't you turn him in?" 

Then the guy says, "I would, but we need the eggs."

Indeed, we need the eggs.