Phil Lofton came up to me at the Harrison Center on First Friday, January 5th, and said that I looked familiar. “Do you spend time at Ash and Elm?” I laughed, then averred that I did spend time at my favorite cider house. After we exchanged names, I remembered that Phil was a facilitator for the “Ciderside Chats” storytelling event hosted by Ash and Elm. I had attended several of the “chats,” which are stories told by participants based on a subject that Phil proposes. My last attendance had been on September 9th, 2018, when the theme was, “Don’t Tell Mom.” I told Phil that I was interested in telling a story based on the current theme: “Coming of Age: The Moment I Grew Up.” He gave me the information I needed to reserve a moment on the stage, and I started to build my tale for the January 23rd chat.
Not being new to public performance, having sung at weddings (and my grandmother’s funeral), I wrote a script for the story I wanted to tell. For a singing performance I will practice until the songs flow from me; storytelling presented different challenges. I am an extemporaneous speaker, an ad-libber, and memorizing the story was not easy for me. I knew it, though, and as someone who crafts 600 words weekly for this publication, I easily transferred my thoughts onto a page.
That night, I began by saying, “I grew up when the United States of Big-Ass America demanded an explanation from me, of my name.” I recounted how my welfare recipient, housekeeper mother, through her employer, got me a job at the University of Pittsburgh library, and when told I needed to get a Social Security number, I gave the Social Security office the name I used as a youth: “Jon Woods.” When I got a W-2, I filed a tax return and the IRS noted the difference between the name on my Social Security card and what I submitted on my tax return: “Clement Jon Woods, III.” I spoke of my 15-year-old self, writing to the IRS with an explanation. I continued on to say that though young, I’d had some adult experiences, working to pay my own way through high school, buying my younger sister her first bra, and watching my mother lift a dead child from a bed and wrap her in a blanket. When I had practiced my presentation for that night, I had skipped over that “dead baby” line like a flat rock skimmed across a still pond. But on that night, I stopped, choked up, unable to continue. “That hurts,” I told the audience. After a moment, I recovered my composure and limped to the end of my story, saying that when “all the citizens of the United States, through the Internal Revenue Service, ask you for an explanation of your name, you’ve grown.” I sat down and had a glass of Marigold Chai cider and thought about the dead child.
An English professor once told me that writing is heuristic, but we also learn something about ourselves when telling our stories. When I spoke to my sister about the child recently, she had no memory of the incident. And though I was only about 6 or 7 years old, I remember the little girl, though it would be some years before I knew that the limp form I saw my mother handling was lifeless.
Telling tales turns over rocks in a stream and memories swirl through the mud and burst on the surface of our consciousness. Though painful, I’d like to tell some more.