Sunday, January 18, 2009

I've always loved stories

Perhaps it's because I grew up with a mother who loved to tell stories of her youth: How she hid under the kitchen stove when the school-teacher stayed at their house because she was scared of her; how, on cold and snowy Sunday mornings, her parents heated bricks on the stove and wrapped them, and put them at the children's feet to keep them warm as the family rode in a sleigh to Church. How she and my Uncle Carl would beg their dad to let them go fishing, and he'd tell them they could, just as soon as each of them pulled the weeds in one row of the garden.

She'd show me the scar on her finger, telling in great detail about a mouse caught in a barrel that bit her when she tried to corner it and catch it.


I heard about the Great Depression, and about how many groceries one could buy with a dollar, back then. If one had a dollar. Mother said the depression didn't really affect them that much, because they were already used to being poor.

She was great with specifics, and I soaked those stories in and waited for more, although in later life I found that her siblings didn't remember some details exactly the same as Mother did.

If you got her together with her sister, my Aunt Ruby, they'd stroll down memory lane hand in hand, prodding one another's memories; what one didn't recall, the other did, filling in the blanks. There would be a "reminiscing marathon" going on!

My grandma, on the other hand, didn't talk as much as I'd have liked about her childhood, about how things were "back then", even when I quizzed her. I think she just wasn't a story-teller.

As I sat at the keyboard yesterday morning and typed out my entry about Miss Dedman, I wondered to myself what it was that made that particular schoolteacher so special to me. I'm sure it wasn't her teaching skill.

I decided it must have been her ability to launch into a story at any opportunity.

The whole high school had a group of vocabulary words to learn, throughout the school year. I believe we did five of them each week. By Friday, we had to be able to spell each one properly, use it in a sentence, and give the definition of the word. We were also to watch the newspapers for any use of those words and bring in a clipping. Since North Kansas City High School's mascot was a hornet, our words were called "Henry Hornet words". To this day, if I come across any of those words when I'm reading, I think to myself, "Henry Hornet word", and try to think what the definition is.

On Mondays, Miss Dedman would go over our five words for the week, and any one of them could become a launching point for a tale from her past. A word like "supercilious" or "pedagogue" would end up taking us all down her personal memory lane; I'm not sure all the students enjoyed this (I think some of them made fun of her for it), but it was right down my alley.

She talked about how cold it was in Minneapolis, where she had attended college, in the winter.

She told us how glad she was to have been born in a time when she wasn't put in that box labeled "old maid", dependent on somebody's kindness for a place to live.

She said all of us should keep a book of best-loved poems beside our beds, so on nights when we couldn't sleep, we could reach for that book.

As graduation approached, she told us, "Even if you don't go on to college, your learning doesn't have to stop. As long as you keep reading books, any books, you are learning."

I probably remember more of what she said than any other instructer I had. I don't even recall most of the faces of my high school teachers, let alone their names.

But I'll always remember Miss Mary Ellen Dedman. She was a story-teller.

9 comments:

  1. I too love a good story. My Mom and Dad were good at it in their later years. I think it was easier for them to remember their youth than the recent past. I enjoyed them so much. Sometimes we heard the same story over again, but it never changed.
    Hope your Sunday is a great one.
    'OnYa'-ma

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  2. Anonymous8:24 AM

    YOU are a good story teller Donna. I really love your blog. When I saw your video about riding Blue, I felt like I was back on a horse again. Riding in Crawford County on the banks of the Huzzah. The sounds of the wind, the squeak of the leather saddle, the breath of the horse, brought it all back to me.

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  3. Anonymous8:55 AM

    I remember lots of my teachers. Mrs. Land, Miss Wright, Miss Cronkite (Walter's Aunt) Good memories all. also when my mom talked about the depression, it wasn't so bad for them as they always had a garden. And chicken on Sundays.

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  4. Nice entry Donna. I have a favorite teacher and her name was Miss Zenowich. Now as time goes on it turns out her Dad is in the nursing home that I work at and it was a pleasure to find out that she was my Miss Zenowich!

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  5. I will always remember my 4th grade teacher, Mrs. Maesner. I learned more in her classroom that year than all the rest of the years combined! What a TEACHER!!! And when I was home sick for two weeks with the hard measles, she stopped by our house on her way home to tutor me a couple of times so I could keep up on the lessons I missed. I literally worshipped the ground she walked on.

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  6. I'm a story lover too. I used to thrive on the stories of my family and so wish we still had elders to continue the tradition of sharing their lives with us.

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  7. My grandmother would show me old hard-backed pictures of sour-faced men and women. Then she would tell me who each was. I still have the pictures . . . but don't remember as well as she did. I love story tellers. You're a good one. You are also good at jogging little memories of mine . . . Blessings, Penny

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  8. Anonymous11:06 AM

    My mother had the foresight to tape some of her old family stories when she realized she would not be long of this world. I listen to them when I can, but I remember them all by heart anyway.

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  9. Anonymous11:06 AM

    My mother had the foresight to tape some of her old family stories when she realized she would not be long of this world. I listen to them when I can, but I remember them all by heart anyway.

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