We’re back together again.
It’s summer, family vacation with the cousins.
My cousin, Alicia, is my age. We’re in those pre-teen years, and we’ve been together almost every summer for as long as we can remember. Including the year that she refused to eat the green macaroni.
We see each other across the parking lot.
She runs towards me. I run towards her.
In our heads, we know this is like a movie… we are hamming it up… running in slow motion, just like we’ve seen it on the big screen. Our smiles are ear-to-ear. We’re not even sure if there is an audience watching us, but it doesn’t matter. We are in our own movie.
We have the thought at the same time. We can see the laughter in each other’s faces. And we suddenly run past each other, just to make the scene funny. Humor is something that we learned from an early age. Our parents sitting around and swapping funny stories, laughter is the fun that holds our family together.
We stop, turn around, laugh and laugh and laugh.
We hug and fall into conversation as if we saw each other yesterday, knowing that we have a whole year of stories to catch up on.
…
As I think back on the many memories of summer vacation and family reunion, the world of Storytelling as an oral performance art feels so familiar. At festivals and gatherings, we sit around and swap stories. We are connected by a love of the art and craft of oral stories, but there is more that connects us. In this genre of oral storytelling, what you say is not as important as what is heard. We are adept at empathy–entering the world from the perspective of another. There is a deep sense of kindness. The old guard are generous in their time, welcoming the newbies. This happens in a dying art. But it’s not really dying, it’s just that by the time that you get into it, you happen to be old. As a regular at festivals, I see many “old” familiar faces now.
One friend from Montana had been coming every year to the Florida Storytelling Festival with her mother. They regularly won the prize for traveling the farthest. This was the third year in a row that I’d seen them both.
They’ve just arrived, and I walk up to them with a smile from ear to ear.
“I feel like we’re family,” I say joyfully, “We see each other once a year!”
We hug and fall into conversation as if we saw each other yesterday, knowing that we have a whole year of stories to catch up on.