Natural-born Storytellers

I come from a long line of storytellers known for relating funny anecdotes about themselves and everyone else. Maybe it’s because I grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, where, during cold winter nights, we spent much of our time indoors, entertaining each other with stories that were, funny and sad, true and made-up.

“She didn’t want to stay down,” my brother said, laughing. Roy was telling me the true story about Aunt Helen who, even in death, found it hard to be left alone. I was sitting in Roy’s living room in Fairbanks when he told me the story. I’ve lived in Portland, Oregon, for many years now, but I occasionally return home to visit.

According to Roy, Aunt Helen, who lived near us when we were young, wanted to be interred next to her parents in the old Pioneer Cemetery downtown. Special arrangements had to be made, though, because officially the cemetery was full. Meanwhile, Aunt Helen was cremated and her ashes put in a steel cylinder that Roy, a sheet-metal worker, made and kept in his shop all summer.

“Nobody picked her up,” he said with a smile, referring to the family’s inability to deal with Aunt Helen’s death.

Eventually, though, one fall evening, they decided it was time for a proper burial. Aunt Helen’s son Bert, along with Roy, Roy’s wife Brenda and their son Rick did the honors. Armed with shovels, a pickax, wheelbarrow, cement mix and Aunt Helen, they drove down to the small cemetery, where a hole had already been cut in the cement slab between Grandma and Grandpa Wilbur’s headstones. The four grave diggers poured in some cement and then inserted Aunt Helen’s remains, but the cylinder immediately popped back up. They pushed it down again but it refused to stay put.

That only made sense because Aunt Helen hated to be left alone. I loved her dearly, looked forward to the nights when I was a kid and she’d stop by our house to talk. We’d have just finished our dinner of moose burgers, moose pot roast or moose stew but would still be sitting at the dining-room table when we’d hear this certain jingle jangle and, sure enough, it was Aunt Helen wearing her silver bangle bracelets and walking up the front steps. We’d offer her a seat at the table, pour her a cup of Hills Brothers coffee and listen to her stories, our elbows deep in cake crumbs.

She entertained us with anecdotes about her day at the post office where she was postmistress. She told us the story about the man who was fired for having B.O. and the one about the employee who got caught with his hand in the till. During the telling, Aunt Helen would, one by one, kick off her dress pumps and remove her clip-on earrings before helping out with the dinner dishes. Often, she would leave a piece of jewelry behind, which was comforting, because it meant she’d be back.

Unlike some members of my family, Aunt Helen openly expressed affection. It was her shoulder I cried on when my father died. In contrast with the other members of my family, Aunt Helen also had a sense of style. She wore nice clothes, dyed her hair and ― after she and Uncle Ken split ―lived in an apartment, which seemed so exotic.

"No one understands how lonely I get,” she told me when, years later, I visited her at the Pioneer Home, a nursing facility at the south edge of Fairbanks. So it wasn’t surprising that it was hard to get her to go underground, even if it meant being close to her parents.

That night in the cemetery, Roy and the rest of the burial party eventually had to break a branch off an overhanging chokecherry tree and use it to poke the metal canister containing Aunt Helen into the ground. Then they slapped a board on top of everything to keep her in place until the cement cured. By then it was dark and starting to snow. They wondered if the snow would prevent the cement from curing and allow Aunt Helen to pop back up. They were laughing really hard but forced themselves to get serious before taking a few minutes to reflect on how much Aunt Helen would have enjoyed their company and closing with a reading from the Good Book.

Compare and contrast

Last Wednesday night, I attended a poetry reading at Blackbird Wineshop here in Portland, Oregon. At times during the evening, I found myself noticing the men in the audience more than the women reading their poems; and more than once, while stroking the stem of my wineglass, I felt how delicate it was and how it contrasted with the solidity of the cement floor.