The art of story telling has fallen on hard times. It is debatable whether it is due to everyone being glued to their phones or the people who should be listening believing they were born with all the knowledge they will ever need. Some might argue that YouTube videos have taken the place of the old stories, but they miss the mark on at least a few levels. YouTube videos are designed for mass audiences of people who don’t know you and likely will never be close to you. I enjoy watching YouTube videos but it is often hard for them to have relevance in my life. Now is possible to film a good story and make it a YouTube video but that happens very rarely and it will likely only have significant meaning to a handful of people.
Since television came along, passing along oral history has not been easy. Most people who are not looking at their lives in the rearview mirror are laser-focused on the future. Wisdom gained over the years is easier to keep to yourself than to pass along. Asking someone older for advice must be one of the hardest things to do, because I have rarely been asked. Maybe the old situations that we faced look so out of sync with the modern world that whatever knowledge we might have must appear useless.
While I can understand no one looking for my advice on how to start a cattle herd or build a barn, I think the rapid disappearance of oral story telling is more worisome.
Few families have their stories written down. The only way for some of the most precious moments to be passed on is by oral story telling.
For me there is a huge difference in writing down a story and in telling it orally. The following story dates back to 1982, and I first wrote it down thirty years later but only after telling it in person several times. I can read out loud what I have written without getting emotional. However, when I start telling the story from memory, the story has a far greater impact on me and at times has brought tears to my eyes. Here is the story.
When we decided to disperse our cattle herd in 1982, it was a huge undertaking and took the better part of a year to prepare for the dispersal sale. A lot of the work was in converting one of our barns into an auction ring with seats for bidders. It meant cleaning out the barn and moving tons of manure. Selling over two hundred head of cattle in a few hours requires the right kind of facility.
Our sale was scheduled in October and the weather turned terrible in late August. There was non-stop rain and the temperatures were often in the forties. It looked like the three people I had hired were not going to be enough to get the job done. We did not have more money to hire additional people. We had to take every load of manure out in a wheel barrow instead with a tractor mounted front end loader
Monday morning two weeks before our sale date, most of the men from the community showed up unannounced on our doorstep willing to work with no pay until our barn was ready. One neighbor even took vacation to help. I couldn’t believe it. They worked shoulder to shoulder with the people I was paying but they refused all pay. It was an effort to get them to take a plate of hot food at lunch. They would work until they had to go do their chores. When they finished their chores they would be back. They did not stop until everything was done. No one would tell me who organized it.
They all showed up for the sale. Friends whose sales I had supported over the years also showed. The rancher from South Dakota that I hired to talk up the cattle saw the great outpouring of community support wouldn’t even take the money I had promised for his trip. Our sale went on to be a great success. I have never forgotten the people who worked in such miserable, cold, rainy conditions to help us take the next step in our lives. It has been over forty years, but I would still help one of them as much as I could if asked.
My mother was a master story teller and I am happy to say that I captured a few of her stories on video. Right now I have them on my iPad so that I can share them and add some context. If you take away two things from this, listen to the stories before they are gone and learn how to spin the best of your stories in the hopes that a family member will remember them and retell them. I learned long ago that every picture has a story and sometimes the story is more interesting than the picture.
Our technological infirmity 