Stories from the Stage

BILL HARLEY: I have known many hamsters.

My growing up was littered with the sad stories of hamsters and their demise.

Their lives were brief.

ALTA MCDONALD: I'm swimming along, and all of a sudden, I see this ripple.

It looks kind of like a loon.

RAYMOND CHRISTIAN: I also didn't consider what was going to happen when my chickens started laying eggs and after you have eaten all the eggs you can.

(laughter) What are you going to do with them?

WES HAZARD: Tonight's theme is "Animal Companions."

Not everybody out there is an animal lover.

But for those of us who are, we tend to form indelible lifelong bonds with these creatures.

They sit at the center of our souls.

They bring us so much in terms of love and friendship, often forming bonds that are somehow more than human.

HARLEY: My name is Bill Harley.

I live in Seekonk, Massachusetts, and I'm a storyteller and a songwriter and an author.

Your entire life seems to be storytelling.

You've been, you know, wrapped up in it in some way or another, for four decades at this point.

I'm just wondering, you obviously believe in the power of storytelling.

What is that power, as you see it?

One of the things about storytelling is, like, when you see somebody do it, it just looks really simple, but it's just this huge thing.

And, and what I think is actually it's really how we express being human.

Uh... because what we do to make sense of things is turn them into stories.

And by those events that we choose, we're talking about how we see the world Tonight When the audience gets to hear your story, what would you hope that they most take away as a lesson or something to remember?

I remember hearing Fred Rogers talk once, and he said that he wanted to be an emotional archaeologist.

He felt like, if I can get back and say something that helps people remember what it first looked like, that there's some growth and also some healing that goes on in that moment.

Not to teach people, but just to say, "Did you feel this too?"

And I'm hoping that that's what the story does.

When you have kids, you get to experience things again, from a half step away.

In some ways, you're more aware, like with pets.

I had a bunch of pets when I was growing up.

We had a couple of dogs.

There was a stray cat, there was a lizard, there was a turtle, there was an ant farm and hamsters.

Hamsters.

When my son Dylan was eight or nine years old, he said he wanted to get a hamster.

He wanted his own pet to take care of.

I have known many hamsters.

My growing up was littered with the sad stories of hamsters and their demise.

(chuckles) Their lives were brief.

(laughter) I was a little skittish about the whole thing because I knew how it was going to end.

But my wife, Debbie, thought it was a good idea.

I don't know if she had hamsters.

And Dylan insisted that he would take care of it.

So, actually, what I was really afraid of was that the hamster was going to get away.

Because all our hamsters escaped, all the time.

One escaped so many times, we renamed it Houdini.

(laughter) And he would just roam the house at night.

And one night he actually ended up in my father's bed.

(laughter) I bit my tongue, we got the hamster.

It was brown and white.

And, and Dylan named it Cookie.

And it must be said that the pet industry had changed.

I mean, I bought my hamster for, I think, like a $1.79.

But this hamster must have been flown in from the deserts of Syria.

It was... it was like $15.

(laughter) And the, the cage that Houdini regularly escaped from was seven or eight bucks.

Not so, the specially designed multileveled, escape proof abode of Cookie.

It had wheels and ladders and tunnels.

It was like Six Flags over Damascus in there.

(laughter) Or at least a McDonald's playscape, you know.

And all this, the wheels, the ladders, the tunnels, the flume, the Space Mountain ride, it was like $65.

But it must be said Dylan was a better pet owner than his father.

He held Cookie carefully.

He fed him the right amount of food.

He cleaned the cage.

He did not make a parachute out of a handkerchief, turn him into a hamster paratrooper, (laughter) See how many Jolly Rogers he could stuff in his pouches, put him in his pocket and take him to school.

(chuckles) And, man, he loved it.

And you know what?

I did, too.

It was so cute.

My parents were laissez-faire parents.

I... my dad didn't even know I had a hamster until it got into bed with him.

(laughter) And he certainly never used the word cute about anything.

So anyway, Dylan's got the hamster for a while, I don't know, nine months, a year.

And he comes into the kitchen one day and he said, "Something's wrong with Cookie."

So I go into his room, and Cookie is in the corner of his cage.

But he's stretched out, not normal hamster repose.

And his mouth is open, he's panting, his bright eyes are duller.

I mean, I'm not a small animal vet, but one look at him and I know, he's a goner.

But do you say that to your kid?

Dylan says, "What's wrong with him?"

I said, "I think he's a little sick."

He said, "What should we do?"

So we get an eyedropper, we drop water into his mouth.

I take one of my hiking socks, I make it into a hamster sleeping bag, put it back in a cage, and said, "Let's let him sleep."

And he says, "Will he be all right?"

And, you know, what's really weird?

How you really get off on how all-powerful your kids think you are until you run into something over which you have no power.

And so I said what all parents say when they don't want to say what they're thinking.

I said, "We'll see."

Which is, I guess, the way we begin to talk about it, death.

We speak in this shorthand, not really saying what we want to say, in the hopes that they'll be able to make sense of it on their own.

Dylan sits with him all day long.

At bedtime, I sing him a song.

I tell him a story.

And Dylan says, "Maybe he'll be better in the morning."

And I said, "Yeah, maybe he will.

We'll see."

Of course, he's not.

He's worse.

His eyes are crusted shut.

He's stretched out.

He's panting.

His teeth are yellow.

Were his teeth yellow before?

Dylan says, "Should we call the vet?"

And I look at my wife, Debbie and she says, "Okay."

And here's where I balk a little bit, right?

Out of earshot of Dylan, I say, "He's going to die."

But Debbie calls the vet, and the vet says they probably can't do much, but if you want to bring him in, maybe they, he can give him an antibiotic.

And I'm against the whole thing because I, you know, I'm pretty sure this trip is going to cost more than the entire cost of the hamster to this point.

(laughs) But, but we're not dealing with the cost of a hamster anymore.

We're dealing with a rite of passage.

So, we put the choice in his lap.

We say to Dylan, "The vet isn't sure that they can help.

We can take him in if you want."

And Dylan says, "Let's go."

He's got this amazing resolve and clarity in his voice.

So we keep him in his hamster sleeping bag.

We put him in a cardboard box.

Dylan sits in the backseat of the car with him.

We bring him into the vet.

We go into the examination room.

Me, and Dylan, and Debbie, and the vet and the assistant.

There's five people around the hamster.

(gentle laughter) And the vet gives him a hamster-sized syringe of vitamins and antibiotics.

She's not patronizing at all.

She's, she's calm and she's serious.

It's like each of us is acting out a role, and we know it.

Even Dylan.

Maybe even Cookie.

So we bring him back home, put him in a cage.

It looks like an abandoned theme park.

And right before dinner, Dylan comes into the kitchen.

He says, "He's not moving."

So I go in there, and I reach in and I take him out.

And here's the thing, and you know it.

Death is death.

I've been in the room with people I love shortly before they pass, and right after.

And there's something there that's palpable that I have no words for.

And I'm telling you, at that moment right there... it was there in the little body that I held in the air in the room, and the sadness on my wife's face, the ineffable look on my son's.

This, after all, was his first.

Which is, I guess, one reason why you have pets.

Not that anybody gets a dog or a parrot or a hamster to say, "I think I'll watch something die."

But it's what you do.

And I said, "I'm sorry, Dylan," and he starts to sob.

And we hold him and he says, "I miss him already."

And we put him back in this hamster sleeping bag, and we put him in the cardboard box.

And we bury him in the backyard, and we put a stone there and we stand around and you read "The Tenth Good Thing About Barney" by Judith Viorst.

And Dylan says, "I like how soft he was."

Like I said, you experience it again watching the magnificence of my son and feeling the sadness of the death of a little living thing.

Damn!

(applause) CHRISTIAN: My name is Raymond Christian.

I was a ghetto kid.

I was a career Army paratrooper.

I'm a doctor of education, a hobby farmer, and a storyteller.

I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, but I currently live in Boone, North Carolina.

How did you get into storytelling?

Informally.

I'd probably been hearing stories all my life when I was a kid, and when I was in the military.

But when I got out of the military, I became more interested in telling stories because I was hearing a lot of stories on the radios and in podcasts.

So, I decided to pitch some stories.

When you tell a story, you know, what's the greatest joy for you in the process?

You know, from conceiving of it to getting up on stage-- like, what part of that do you love the most?

When you're speaking to people and there's a rhythm going on, and the audience has given you back what you were giving, you're in a special spot.

They control you.

You control them.

It's like your heartbeats are in sequence with one another.

And that, for me, is the joy.

I live in a rural part of western North Carolina, near the town of Boone.

My wife and I both were offered jobs at the local university, Appalachia State, and that's how we ended up moving to this place.

Well, I knew that despite the fact that I was a ghetto kid, I had a career in the military and a life in academics, that this was going to be a radical and dramatic change in lifestyle for me and my family.

But, I also knew it was going to be an opportunity.

An opportunity for me to engage in my lifelong love of animals and this deep desire I had to one day to have an organic farm.

Based around chickens for meat, eggs, and portable high-nitrogen fertilizer from chicken poop.

(laughter) So, I bought some chicks and I raised them, and I enjoyed handling them, and I loved watching them peck around and scratch around in the yard.

But there were a few things in this journey that I didn't consider fully, the first of which was chicken poop for fertilizer.

(laughter) It was, in fact, easily transportable in buckets and pots, and your shoes.

(laughter) And your clothes.

(audience groans) And it contained disease-causing bacteria like salmonella.

I also didn't consider what was going to happen when my chickens started laying eggs.

Now, it could have been because of the breed of the chickens I had, their age, the way we were feeding them.

But we were getting about a dozen eggs a day.

And after you have eaten all the eggs you can... (laughter) Boiled them, pickled them, fried them, pressured your friends to take them from you, what are you going to do with them?

But the policies, the rules and the regulations where I live made it impossible for us to give these eggs away to food pantries for some reason.

And I couldn't understand that.

So we were really left with the only thing we could do, and that was throw them away.

And I probably threw away hundreds and hundreds of eggs.

(chuckles) Now, when it came down to the meat, I was a little bit slow to start on that.

So, you can raise chickens both economically and efficiently, but you got to have breeds of chickens that reach maturity in less than six months, because the more you feed them, the more money it costs, and every day counts.

I also didn't consider how much I would love the chickens, enjoy the chickens, appreciate watching the chickens as they run around.

And I also didn't consider the fact that this habit that I have is I needed to name them.

(laughter, audience "aww"s) And one particular chicken that loved to run around and roll around the dirt, this big, golden, Buff Orpington chicken.

She used to like to fluff her feathers up.

So I named her Fluffy.

(laughter) But a point came where the neighbors and the people in the community, who also raised chickens and other animals, they were starting to say to me, "Man, your chickens have gotten to the point "where their best egg laying days have passed, "and they're probably so old and tough right now that you can't eat them."

So, I thought about that.

And so the day came that I decided that I was going to take my five oldest chickens and I was going to dispatch them.

And the way you do this is we take an old traffic cone and we would nail it to a tree, and you put the chickens inside the cone upside down.

You pull down on the head and you cut them across the throat.

(audience groans) Yeah, I know.

(laughter) So I had my five old birds, and I thought that I would start with Fluffy.

(audience reacts in dismay) (inhales) So I turned Fluffy upside down and I put her head inside the cone, and I grabbed the neck and I pulled down on the head, and I took the knife and I cut her across the throat.

And it didn't go well.

Fluffy screamed and she squawked, and she gave off this grotesque sound.

So I grabbed the knife again, and I tried to cut across her throat again.

This time I cut all the way through and with so much force, I cut right into my finger, all the way to the bone.

(audience groans) And the blood was squirting out of my finger, and out of Fluffy's neck, and her head was on the ground, and her beak moved up and down.

And it was a horrible death and I didn't want it to be a waste of life.

So I finished processing her and took her in the house and told my wife to cook her.

But she knew that... couldn't bake it, certainly couldn't fry it.

It would be too tough.

So, she decided to boil it, and she threw in some vegetables for us to eat along with it.

But neither my wife or any of the kids would touch it.

Nobody would eat it.

So, after boiling all day long, I finally decided I would try to eat a little piece.

And I reached into the pot and I got a little piece of meat, and I put it in my mouth, and it was all stringy and tough and difficult to eat.

And I tried to swallow a piece and it tasted terrible.

And I spit it out!

And I cried.

And I came away understanding that why you don't name your food.

You don't eat your pets.

And everything on earth, whether it's animal or plant, pays a price and a sacrifice to sustain you.

(applause) MCDONALD: My name is Alta McDonald.

I live in Roslindale, Mass.

I'm a native of Down East, Maine, and so identify myself as from Maine.

My professional background is in clinical social work.

I've worked in a variety of settings: inpatient psychiatry, counseling, consulting.

And when I was consulting to nursing homes, I really became so interested in the stories of elderly people.

And did you grow up with a strong storytelling tradition?

Was there, you know, is that big in your family?

My great-uncles were all sea captains of the same vessel.

So, they had tales to tell about that.

And is this your first time getting on stage to tell a story in front of an audience?

Yes, I'm the first time storytelling.

So, how are you feeling about, you know, sharing your story for the first time?

Are you nervous?

Thrilled?

I'm just really curious.

I tell people that I'm on a continuum and it goes from being thrilled to terrified.

It's early spring.

I am 62 years old, and I'm living in an affluent suburb of Boston.

Shortly after I moved here, I became divorced and therefore a single parent of two young, active children.

I've worked very hard to maintain this fictional lifestyle, which I really don't even like.

So, I decide that I am going to ditch the whole thing and that I'm going to move to Northfield, Maine, which is 15 miles from the nearest town of Machias.

My friends say that I'm nuts.

(laughter) You're going to leave all this and go to that place?

Well, I was determined to do this.

I had spent every summer of my life in this special place.

I was surrounded by a loving extended family and I enjoyed every minute of it.

I particularly liked my Uncle Howe, who was a prestigious sea captain.

And he decided to teach seamanship on this placid lake (laughs) in the state of Maine.

(laughter) And, and one day he said, "I have a special treat for you.

"I want to share with you my binoculars.

"I want you to point them "in a space, if you see a black dot on the horizon."

And he said, "You can call them spyglasses.

That's good enough."

So you train the spyglasses on that spot and sort of circle around because it may be a loon.

And loons dive under the water and pop up within the range of where they started.

This was my very happy place.

I loved it there.

By late May, I had sold my house and I arrived in Northfield, Maine, and discovered that it's been a horrible winter.

The phone cable was dangling in the breeze.

There was squirrel poop all over the place.

(laughter) A porcupine had left tons of quills in the garage.

And I looked up and I saw this tiny black dot on a rafter.

I thought, "Uh-oh, that's probably a bat."

And I really hate flying rodents.

(laughter) I really get creeped out by the whole thing.

So, the other thing that happened was there was power in just a part of the building.

The next day, I went to a pay phone and I tried to reach people to help me.

The only person I reached was Johnny the electrician.

The phone company guy said he would come soon.

But in Maine, who knows when soon is?

(laughter) So Johnny came and he said, "Jeez, who the hell "did this bad job?

(laughter) "Any idiot would know "that you should put "electric wires through a pipe so that rodents don't chew on them."

And I said, apologetically, "It was my father.

(laughter) "He bought this place for $1,000 in 1952 "and he believed that he could do anything.

"It was his job to modernize this place, and look what a mess he made."

I am totally overwhelmed.

And at that point, the lake beckons to me.

I realized that it probably is very cold, but I'm going to forge ahead anyway.

So I'm swimming along, and all of a sudden, I see this ripple on my right side.

And I'm thinking, is there some kind of sea monster out here?

That after all, this is a lake.

(laughter) And then I look again and I think, "Well, it looks kind of like a loon."

But loons are not known to want to be close to humans.

But the next day I do it, I swim again.

And sure enough, it is a loon with all of magnificent black and white plumage and the splendid red eye.

And he starts to swim with me, except he's better equipped than I.

(laughter) Because he has these enormous web feet and he is known to only live in the water.

We start swimming together, and this goes on almost to the end of June.

And one day... my neighbor comes to provision her place for the Fourth of July.

And would you believe, the phone company guy comes!

(laughter) They both see this, this person swimming with the loon.

And by this time, I'm calling him Louie.

Louie the Loon.

(laughter) And they go back to Machias, Maine, and they start telling this story, about this woman who was swimming with a loon.

And... the story goes to a bar, which all the people that I need to help me hang out there.

(laughter) And all of a sudden, everybody wants to see the Loon Lady and Louie.

(laughter) So, by the Fourth of July, I had an avalanche of helpers.

Everything was in beautiful shape.

Ancient Indigenous people believed that loons help humans become... at one with the world.

My experience with Louie helped me become whole.

I feel at peace.

Thank you.

(cheers and applause) THERESA OKOKON: The Stories from the Stage podcast with extraordinary true stories-- wherever you listen to podcasts.

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