Story-catching at the airport

I like to see eyebrows go up when unusual objects appear on the security screening at airports. I once traveled with a friend who had a dinosaur bone in his carry-on luggage. It was a real dinosaur bone, too. For the benefit of the security staff he unwrapped it and passed it around. My Hang drum is just about as odd. It resembles a mini-UFO and travels in a hard-shell case inside a specially designed backpack. At the Evers-Jackson Airport on my way home from Mississippi in May, I put my drum on the belt and watched to see the expression of the man standing besides the screen. His eyes widened.

“What's that?” He looked up to see who was going to claim this strange piece of luggage.

“It's a drum!”  I said, delighted to have some interest.

Another man in uniform, collecting the plastic bins, asked me if I was a percussionist.

Not wanting to claim anything quite that grand, I said, “I'm a storyteller. I use the drum with my storytelling.” The word “storyteller” immediately struck a chord with him.

“My grade two teacher was a wonderful storyteller,” he beamed. I was curious, as I always am, about the storytellers in people's lives.

“What kind of stories did she tell?” I asked, lacing up my boots.    

“She told the one about the bull,” he informed me, as if I would know immediately which story he meant. “You know, the bull in the farmyard....”

That was how large the story loomed in his memory. There could only be one story about a bull. He shook his head in fond remembrance.

“She was a wonderful storyteller. She died just a short while ago, after teaching for 45 years.”

As I was slinging my drum on my back I had an urge to ask him his teacher's name. There was no reason for me to know it, but it felt like a way for him to bring her more fully into his memory, and in doing so, to re-experience and re-member her gift to him.

He was delighted to tell me: “Her name was Mrs. Mooney,” he said.  “Mrs. Gladys Mooney of Kosciusko, Mississippi.”

Stories are everywhere. Some of the best ones are stories of storytellers. Who are the storytellers in our lives?