Storylines

" A story allows us to envision the possibility of things. It draws on the powers of memory and imagination. It awakens us to our surroundings…It is here, by our own participation in nature that we pick up clues to an awareness of what story is. Story making comes out of our life experiences. And there are many, many layers we can penetrate."

So Terry Tempest Williams writes in the introduction to her book Pieces of White Shell. Since the beginning of our Road Scholars trips over a year before, I had been acutely aware of the power of stories and storytelling.

On many of our trips people are given assigned roles at the outset of the day – some people become responsible for everything that goes right, or everything that goes wrong. Some will be our voices when we have run-ins with authority figures, some our ambassadors when we meet strangers, and some are merely responsible for things like weather and transportation. I have found that by having these humorous roles we remove some of the feeling of someone being genuinely responsible for things which happen – to be the person responsible for weather is a fine example of that.

One of the roles that I chose early on in the trips was a "keeper of the story of the day." I hoped that the person who played that part would be able to pay attention to the stories that unfolded during the day and in the end of the trip, in some form of closure, we would be able to come together and hear that story again.

Although I think I have offered up that job on a number of occasions, no one has ever retold our story at the end of that day. What I have discovered is that our stories require time and the next trip before the stories from the trips do indeed form themselves into stories. Now, because there are so many stories from each of our trips, it seems impossible to make one poor person be the vessel of all of our tales. Like a true community, it becomes the responsibility and pleasure of all of the collective members of the group to be story keepers.

Terry Tempest Williams, who wrote about working on a Navajo reservation ostensibly teaching children, but really being taught by them, echoes this same sentiment. She says:

" A story has a composite personality which grows out of its community. It maintains a stability within the community, providing common knowledge as to how things are, how things should be – knowledge based in experience. These stories become the conscious of the group. They belong to everyone."

Instead of focusing a day on our own stories, I thought it would be a great adventure to go out and observe people. We had studied art and poetry, had looked at the natural world and even put ourselves under the microscope. I thought, by observing people and then imagining our stories, we would come to understand more about ourselves. Or at least have some laughs.

New York city is one of the great people-watching cities in the world. It seems that there is an honesty of action in New York and more often than not, people let down their guards and show their essential selves. I had gotten the idea for this course at 2 am on a Sunday morning when my car had been towed from 21st street. Having your car towed illegally (no signs…come on Guiliani!) is bad enough, but when you see the behavior of the people at the car impound on the docks, the situation takes on a whole other form.

I thought I was witness to a play. We were all on the same set – a dingy office where the two people who worked for the city, behind their bullet proof glass cases, held all of the power. And they happily knew it. Every few minutes a new group of people would come in, having finally found their way to this little corner of hell. Men in shiny suits whose limousine had been towed, a young Japanese couple with dyed hair and pierced eyebrows, an older man and a bleached blonde woman in a microskirt complaining in a heavy German accent that the city of New York should hire people who can speak proper English. Kevin's friend Rob rocking rhythmically in his chair rapping over and over, "dude, I have a flight in three hours you know. I got to get home."

If I weren't a player in the scene I would have liked it all the more. As it was, it seemed pretty amusing. I had remembered other places that had evoked the same kind of tableau – airport waiting areas when the flight has been delayed, the marriage office in Manhattan where women in gold lame fought people in jeans holding plastic flowers for seats in the waiting area, and everyone's favorite – the Department of Motor Vehicles. What if we became observers of human nature? Non participants in the drama but observers of the scenes? What would it tell us about the way people behave in places where they are forced to wait, where others have power over them, or where they believe that no one is watching the way they behave towards each other?

I created a list of places where I thought we could best observe human nature and then ranked them by levels of difficulty. Some of the places required that the person him/herself would feel comfortable blending in with the other people there (this would be especially important in an adult bookstore on 42nd street or a hospital waiting room.) Some were easier, like Zabar's Deli on a Saturday morning where people have been known to come to blows over who ordered which whitefish. In the end, I had a list of twenty locations and I imagined that we would fan out all over the city and spend our mornings observing people at everything from emergency rooms to cathedrals, children playing in parks, to tourists waiting on line for the empire state building. As part of our role, I had also created fake credentials for us from the fictitious University of Towzo (see the description of the New England Writers course in October for a definition of Towzo). We all need to have an excuse as to who we were, and there is nothing like having a letter signed by Dr. Crikey Von Blimey to gain you access into the deep study of people who can't figure out how to buy metro cards in Grand Central Station, is there?

In the end, as our group gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library, it turned out that we were only going to be a group of five instead of the twelve I had expected. While we waited for people to arrive, Heather went on an personal exploration mission and climbed up and around the wisdom statue at the library. Remarkably, none of the guards seemed to notice her and she put her small hands in the giant marble hands of wisdom. After riding the lions outside of the library, what thrills would be left for us there?

When we realized that our little group was complete and that the others weren't coming, we decided to focus our energies on the Upper West Side, instead of fanning out all over the city. Heather planned to go to Zabar's Deli and Julie to the ticketing area at the Museum of Natural History. Leigh would go to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and since she had never been there, Kevin and I went with her. As the largest cathedral in the world we figured there would be plenty of room for the three of us there.

Inside we heard a choir. They looked like a high school group, based on their robes, and they didn't seem to have much of an audience beyond the yawning chaperones. Kevin and I sat down to listen and to speculate on where they were from. I wondered if they had envisioned that their concert at St. John the Divine would be in front of a full congregation, like Paul Winter's Solstice Concert, and were disappointed when it merely echoed in an empty hall.

After the performance ended with the young people presenting their choir leader with a silver baton from Tiffany's, we leaned over to one of the parents and asked where they were from.

" Ocean City, Maryland."

"Are you enjoying your trip to New York?"

"Well," she said in a southern drawl I wouldn't have expected from Maryland, "We've seen Times Square and Rockefeller Center, and the Empire State Building. We were really surprised by how clean the city is." She paused and then added, "We were kind of disappointed that we hadn't seen a drug deal or a police bust or anything."

As she spoke, I thought about the last time Mandy and I had walked to the Cathedral through the park on the other side. If they were looking for that sort of excitement, they really didn't have to walk too far.

"That disappoints you?"

"Well, it's what you expect from New York."

When I was in elementary school my brother had been in a play that had been written about Ocean City, Maryland and its terrible teenage drug problems. My associations of Ocean City were based on "Fat Matt" and apparently theirs were based on "Cops." Funny how the stories we hear of places influence our expectations for the way those places should be and that we are disappointed when they are not as advertised.

I didn't have the heart to tell her that there were probably more drugs being done on her little class trip than there were in most of 112th street, and had one of her students been arrested on possession, she wouldn't have been so impressed by the idea of seeing a drug bust, but I let it go. Something about being in a cathedral kept me on good behavior, I guess.

We drifted off from the disappointed choir and found ourselves in a Lenten photo exhibit in one of the tiny chapels. Lent is an interesting time in that there is, built into its nature, the contemplation of morality. From our contemplation of death often come our understandings of life.

In huge luminous photo in front of me was a baby's hand. Tiny finger nails clasped into a small fist. Then a foot, a toe tag. Beautiful close up photographs of feet like curved swans. Pictures of the dead.

In one of the most chilling photo exhibits I've ever seen Kevin, Leigh and I bore witness to that which speaks without words – the stories of people who no longer speak. The cathedral was sponsoring a photo exhibit by a photographer who had taken post mortem photos. There was nothing voyeuristic or macabre in these photos, they illuminated the human spirit that still seemed to glow from these stilled bodies. Outside the exhibit they had postcards from the show – to whom could I possible send a picture of a tiny curled fist. An acorn that would never grow. A drowned seed.

Without words we went to the poetry wall. There I find solace in the spirit of renewal and I love to read the words of people who have asked to be heard. They include their prison numbers, their letters thanking the Cathedral for appreciating their work. They are handwritten and they are stories of the people who inhabit this cathedral, even if they are behind bars. Theirs are stories I want to know, want to imagine. They have a disembodied life.

Robert Atkinson a theorist on the power of stories writes in his book The Gift of Stories:

"Our stories illustrate our inherent connectedness with others. The stories of our lives are sacred even before we realize it, because they are all guided by he same underlying cultural patterns and enduring elements that tie us all together as human beings. When we become aware of these lasting, universally human elements in our own stories, we recognize their sacredness. The more familiar we are with these enduring elements of traditional stories, the better we become at recognizing these same elements in our own life stories."

Looking at the poems on the wall and hearing in their voices some of the same thoughts which echo in mine, I wonder if we are not all connected by some invisible thread of that which simply makes us human.

It is getting late and we've promised to meet Heather and Julie at the New York youth hostel on 111th street. Kevin, Leigh and I walk out past the memorial to firemen, and the sculpture of the burned body commemorating Kosovo and the Holocaust. All of our stories are connected, even in those small alcoves, even with the fanciful creatures in the children's garden outside.

We walk to the hostel and wait in its entranceway waiting. This, too, is one of my favorite New York people-watching haunts. The coffee shop, which is unfortunately closed, is usually home to lively discussions of people in accents from all over the world sharing their adventures in the city, or favorite places to eat in Kuala Lumpur.

Julie and Heather arrive and we decide to walk down Broadway to find something to eat and to share our adventures. Kevin asks how they feel about the words "girls" and "women" and when would they prefer one description over the other. Talk is light over lunch and later we go to the quiet of the New York Public Library's reading room to write. Maybe it is true, that on the days when we are in motion like the nature writing day, it is too hard to slow down and write. We have had small moments of writing on other trips, but they have only really been successful on two-day trips. It seems that in the confines of one day, it is too much to ask for people to be observers and reflectors, to take in the colors and chaos of the city and to process it down to the human all at once. I know I thought I would be up to the task and yet when we finally found a table in the reading room and I had made enough noise in moving my seat around to irritate at least 10 die-hard reading room denizens, I found that my notebook was empty and my thoughts were blank.

Maybe Wordsworth had it right after all. At the ruins of Tintern he was reminded of other times and there his emotions were recollected in tranquility. It seems stories need to have growing space. The seeds get planted on one day, but they clearly need time to sprout. Perhaps the stories themselves need to work on us a while before they come to light.

I wasn't alone in that experience. None of us seemed to be able to write and it wasn't long before we were back downstairs in the Dunkin' Donuts telling stories. At the time I thought the day had been something of a failure in that what I had intended hadn't come to pass, but now I'm not so sure. I think the stories worked on us, and I know that the images of that day, of seeing people in tableaus, of that tiny curled fist, of Heather and Leigh's hug when Heather opened her birthday present and the memory of sitting in the back bench of the #20 bus with Julie and Kevin and Heather and I engaged in a heavy discussion as to what is imagination, certainly worked on me.

In every airport I've seen since that trip, I've thought about how much I would like to do this trip again, maybe in an airport where we could be together and yet apart. Maybe it is just that we, as a group, have come to collect so many stories of our own that it is hard to step out of that role into one of quiet observer. I do not know, but I do know that the power of our stories, the ones we see and the ones we create on our own, is the bedrock of who we are.It is as Terry Tempest William's writes in Pieces of White Shell:

"Storytelling awakens us to that which is real. Honest. It is the most pure form of communication because it transcends the individual…Those things that are most personal are most general, and are, in turn, most trusted. Stories bind. They are connective tissue. They are basic to who we are."