Telling the Stories

There was a blogger gathering in Montreal this past weekend, and among the writers I met for the first time were Rachel, Tom, Dale, and Dave - each a totally distinct personality, all a great pleasure to finally meet in person. One morning over coffee, we were talking about, well, blogging, and what we all were thinking of writing about in the future. I expressed a bit of fatigue and uncertainty about my writing direction, and Tom, always encouraging, emphatically said, "Just tell the stories." And he's right; the stories are all around us, waiting to be told. Dave is a particular fan of the father-in-law stories and encouraged me to write more of them and collect them in some form. Then we talked about what we liked most in each other's writing, and how one might characterize each of our approaches and styles. I don't know how to express what it feels like to have conversations like that, except to say that they are - in my life anyway - rare, precious, and incredibly affirming. I only hope I gave back as much as I received.  So, Tom, in gratitude, here is a new story:

Yesterday we rode our bikes downtown to complete our applications for the Québec healthcare system. We needed new photos, with particular specifications, so we stopped at a little passport photo shop in the lobby of the same building. The proprietor, a genial older man in a white coat, asked us where we were from and engaged us in conversation. When he found out that J. was also a photographer, he opened a drawer and showed us rubber-banded packages of rejected photos, each thick package representing one year. Those were from the days of film cameras; he saved them to be able to prove to the goverment, for sales tax purposes, why his material costs didn't match number of photos he charged for. But now, with a digital setup, he could easily delete a photo when the subject didn't like her hair (me) or the reflection off their nose (J.), and take a new one.

As I looked into the drawer, the faces stared back at me: black faces, Asian faces, white faces, all coming to Canada for some reason, each one with a personal story of hardship, decision, loss, and hope. "I'm especially interested in the refugees," the photographer said. "I meet so many of them, and they tell me their stories -- many of them have had lives that you or I can barely imagine. They come here hoping to make a new life, and often they are fleeing something terrible. But what courage it takes to turn your back on everything, to give it all up! They come back to see me later, too, a few years later when they've gotten their passport and citizenship, and we talk again."

"I remember one young woman," -- he gestured toward the chair in front of his desk -- "she sat right there. A tall, slender, elegant African woman, with that beautiful bearing that many African women have. She was maybe 20 years old, and she was the sole survivor of a Somalian family of 19 people - they had all been murdered, down to the last one. The only reason she hadn't been killed was that she had been in London, studying. So she had made her way here, and needed a picture for her immigration papers. She told me this, and I asked her, 'What are you going to do now?'"

"I'm going to walk in the front door of McGill University today," she said, "and I am going to walk out the back door in four years with my degree."

"And that's exactly what she did," he said. "She came back and showed me. But can you imagine that maturity, from someone so young who had been through what she had? I asked her how she could go on. And she said, 'What happened is history, it is in the past, and I cannot change it. I am responsible for myself now., and responsible for doing something wih the life that I have."

He paused and looked up at the interior wall of the shop. "I used to have a world map on that wall over there. Every time someone would come in I'd ask them to put a pin in the map showing where they came from. The pins were color-coded for men, women, and children.Twice I had to have the map and the wall repaired, and finally I had to take it down because the map was falling apart." He smiled. "It's a fascinating life, doing this. I came out of retirement and started this shop. And I'd happily do this work for no pay at all."

Comments

[qB]

Wow.

[Soen Joon Sn]

A good story to tell, and well-told. One of my close college friends has been doing refugee aid in Africa for several years now. Like the photographer, she'd happily do it without pay, for the sheer humanity of it, everyone's humanity.

[Anna]

Yes, let's tell the stories. Wonderful post!
Anna.

[Natalie]

Beth, Tom's advice was perfect. You have the gift of story-telling in abundance, the eyes and ears to pick the ones to tell, the self-discipline to stay with it and the skill to put it all together so beautifully. What more does a writer need? A blog (yes!). An audience (yes!). A publisher (yes!).

What a wonderful man this passport photographer is and how lucky he was to be celebrated by you.

[Jean]

Yes, that is a story worth telling. And wonderfully told. And a gift. Thank you.

[zuleme]

good story, Beth. It's always good to be reminded of how much we have and often take for granted.

[leslee]

Wow. Fascinating story, Beth. And without your blog I wouldn't know anything about this.

[Tom Montag]

Oh, Beth, thank you. There is such joy in finding the work we are meant to do, work that we'd do for "no pay" just as this photographer would. You have found that kind of work telling the little stories of hope, and some day - in addition to your father-in-law stories - you may want to publish THE BIG BOOK OF THE LITTLE STORIES OF HOPE. If we keep our eyes and ears open, the stories keep accruing. But you know that, so enough....

[Lorianne]

Wonderful. That photographer is doing exactly what *you're* doing here: telling (and thus saving) the stories of all the individuals who otherwise would be faceless. Keep doing it, please, because it's work that needs doing.

[Rachel]

(o)

[language hat]

Wonderful story. Thank you. Keep it up.

[St Antonym]

Those African women, and their bearing. I often wonder what is it they know that Westerners don't, or that Westerners have forgotten. Is it suffering? Is it community? Is it a dignity that doesn't take its source in material circumstances?

One of the conversations that happens often in the media in this part of the world is about what materially poor countries can learn from materially rich ones. A conversation that I'd like to see more of (and I think many people here will agree with me) is about the opposite: what do "they" know that we don't?

Thank you for writing, Beth.

[Beth]

Yes. Along those lines, I was encouraged by a recent change in the Episcopal Church's approach to "mission", where they acknowledged this former mindset as being simply wrong in today's world, saying that the developed world had just as much to learn from the poor and less-developed world, and redefining the focus of mission as simply "being with." Of course economic help needs to flow from richer to poorer, but I thought this refocussing and redefining about the other types of exchange was a very important step.

[dale]

(o)

[peter]

You do tell a story very well, and your people stories are as compelling as your descriptions. I think it's because you're so open to approaching people and you listen to them closely. I'm sure they enjoy the experience as much as we do, who are only listening over the transom.

[mb]

(o)