Well… I’ve been replaced as storyteller. Or, at least, it’s only a matter of time.
My nephew, Dr. M, lives in Bangalore with his parents. Anuja and her mother live nearby. I call him once a week to tell him a story. The time zones work out so that it’s midnight my time, but I usually catch him while he is eating breakfast, or just after. Often he asks me to tell him a particular story (lately, he’s obsessed with his Avengers figurines) but sometimes I just tell him a random tale, either something I’ve heard somewhere or something of my own devising.
The Golden Screwdriver (Not Replaced Yet)
Last week, I told him the story of the little boy with the golden screw instead of a belly-button. I lifted the story from A Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss. You may not know the story so I’ll sketch it quickly here:
A boy is born with a golden screw instead of a belly-button. As he grows up, he starts asking people why he has this… unusual feature. First he asks biologists. Then other scientists. Goldsmiths. Then anyone… journalists, jurists, kings… Finally, He goes up into the mountains to meet the King of Bhutan (I had to pick a country I could remember still having a monarch but lacking the unsavory associations of a lot of extant royal houses—Saud, Windsor, etc. Looking back, it is a good guess that Bhutan’s far-famed Gross National Happiness Index is a propaganda tool, and no true indication of its leaders’ altruism. But I may wait until Dr. M. is six or seven before I add that to the story).
Anyway. He visits Bhutan and becomes a guest of the King. The king presents a golden screwdriver from inside a golden box. He twists the boy’s belly-button-screw three times and… the boy’s butt butt falls off.
Now. This is what a storyteller would call a ‘shaggy-dog’ story. The idea is to drag the story out as long as possible; bonus points if your listener interrupts the telling for a discussion of some minor point of the lore. I chose the story because I was trying to mess with Dr. M. Just to see what he would do. So imagine my delight (mixed with disappointment) when he said: “Again!” Almost as soon as I was done with the first telling.
Days Leading up to being Replaced
Anyway, that was last week. Then seven days elapsed. I did my editing for the magazine. Taught my students. Cooked a bit, cleaned a bit, practiced piano. Went for walks. One morning, I actually made this really nice vegetable stir-fry, the leftovers of which got folded into an egg-dish with rice and… anyway. Far too quickly, the weekend came around, and it was time for my phone call with Dr. M.
This week, he asked me to tell a Black Panther story. By the way, whoever has successfully marketed the movie versions of these comic book characters to a five-year-old in India has done an incredible job. He’s way too young to watch those movies but they’ve already firmly established themselves as his childhood obsession, beating out Pokemon and James Cameron’s Avatar and dinosaurs and all the rest, so… good job! From one storyteller to another, my mouse-hat’s off to you.
An Interlude Concerning the House of Mouse
Because that’s the thing. I can’t tell him a Black Panther story. Those stories are violent and political and complicated. And the movies end with these CGI battles that… I mean… do they do anything for you? Do we really need the last third of these Marvel movies? They feel like if someone dumped a bucket of GI Joe action figures on my face while I was nursing a migraine.
So I have to tell him stories in which the Avengers are regular people doing regular-people things. A few weeks ago…
Bruce Banner was too short to get on the roller coaster. And that made him sooooo ANGRY that he transformed into the Hulk! But then Hulk was too BIG to get on the roller coaster!
The point isn’t the story. The point is the silly back-and-forth where I ask him questions and he answers them, and vice versa.
The Storyteller and the Black Panther
Right. So. This week’s story was about T’Chaka being a busy monarch but making sure to come home in time to tell baby T’Challa a bedtime story.
T’Chaka is the king of a whole country so he is very busy. Every day he has to meet with political leaders from his own country, right? And with political leaders from other countries. And there are ordinary citizens who have complaints.
So what else do you think a King would have to do?
Dr. M didn’t even think about his answer before he said: “A guy wants to know why he has a golden screw instead of a belly-button!”
A Child’s First Original Idea
He’s five years old. Five. I laughed for a solid minute and couldn’t stop. It was midnight, which means that if anyone heard me they might have wondered what memory of a joke the local poltergeist was giggling along with. The joke was so funny and the delivery was so perfect that I didn’t notice something had happened.
This was Dr. M’s first original thought; at least the first one he had expressed to me. I remember such moments from my little brothers, as well. And from my other young relatives. It’s a magical moment; an awesome and terrifying moment. Encapsulated in those scant few seconds is the memory of this person; this fully formed but tiny person when they were just a few days old, their eyes wide and staring and unseeing. And, too, encapsulated in that moment is the time in the distant future when they will be taking care of us instead of the other way around.
After Being Replaced: The Sunset of the Storyteller
But it appears I will be taking my curtain call sooner than that: because ,as one of Dr. M’s designated storytellers (like any good child-tyrant, he has at least six in regular rotation) my job security is threatened–is it not?–by the fact that, at the age of five, he has already mastered the call-back-joke. I’m in my mid thirties. I naturally imagined I would have a few innings left. But no. We’re months away at most from when he’s visiting me in my nursing home and I’m looking up at him with rheumy, distant eyes, asking him to tell me a story. No doubt he will begin:
There once was an uncle who lived in New York. And this uncle had a golden screw instead of a belly-button…
If you like what you’ve read here, help keep the site going and
