storytelling

“Why can’t I write a story like you?” the young invalid questioned the knowing eyes of his teacher.

“It must be hard without your thumbs,” Jasmine responded, the joke creasing her eyes.

“Well how do I go about winning my thumbs?” he asked, the pressure of the old question weighing upon his shoulders, sagging them near defeat.

Jasmine cleared her throat. He looked up at her with infant hope glossing his eyes. She had never responded to this question.

“If you want your thumbs, you must learn to tell a story. You must use the first method of telling, the method used before papyrus. Use the gift you already have to earn the treasure you seek.”

He jolted to his feet, knocking his simple wooden dining room chair off balance, to the floor.

He walked from town to town. At first no one would listen to his story. He would stand outside, shouting his stories to people walking to work, or with groceries, and they would continue past him, scared that he might get them sick by looking at him. Then one day an old man stopped to wait for the bus. The young invalid approached him and began.

“I don’t suppose you have time to hear the story of the Wright brothers. They came from a small town in southern Maine, and they have become something of a local legend in those parts. There’s a thing about them that is rather hard to understand. Well it seems that everything just happens to work out their way. Try as they might to get in trouble, they always managed to just weasel their way out.”

As he continued to speak the old man stayed and listened. He completed his story, and removed himself from the fervency involved in his tale, he noticed that there was a small crowd around him.

Months later he was filling bars and hotel lobbies, soccer fields and parks, people all listening. Within a year, stadiums full of people paid to see him tell his original stories, brilliant tales and uplifting sagas, always new, always original.

Finally he returned to his teacher.

“I think I have earned my thumbs now,” he confidently told her.

Jasmine eyed him up chuckled.

“You fill a stadium or two and you think you can tell a story now? Those people have already forgotten your tales, they were nothing. Crowds are all fools, most of them don’t even know why they are there, some instance of marketing or the fervent way you tell your tales has probably brought them more than your story. No, when you earn your thumbs you will know it, for you will have told a story that has changed someone, a story that will haunt them at night and drive them in day, something to remember forever.”