Sunday, July 12, 2020

The Story Tellers


Send in the Clowns
The Story Tellers
Where are They Now?
By Stephen L. Wilmeth



            There is an interesting archived video of Frank Sinatra.
            In it, Mr. Sinatra sings Send in the Clowns. The title may not be automatically familiar to most of us, but the tune is recognizable. It existed when we were young and when most of us can agree we were much more optimistic about our world and the future, our country, and the children that would eventually enter our lives.
            As Sinatra sings, there is a background compilation of classic entertainers, comedians that were once on the TV screens in our living rooms. Milton Berle, Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Phyllis Diller, Jonathan Winters, Carol Burnett, Flip Wilson, and many others who provided such skillful delivery of wholesome and family centered entertainment.
            As the video plays out, you realize those people are not just missing from our lives, but their progeny, the successors of their genre, no longer exist. Name one comedian that modern day young and old can watch together, that is a household name, that can command our interest, and will not insult our intelligence or disrupt what little control we have over the eroding standards of our world.
            They no longer exist.
            Where are They Now?
            In four separate conversations this week, a parallel subject was discussed.
            The late ‘40s, the ‘50s in their entirety, and the years of 1960 through 1964 or 1965 may have been the best of all times. There was a societal innocence with a different set of taught and enforced values. There was honest patriotism and pride. There was expectation of reasonable behavior. There was chained allegiance to family units and, as that ranch wife of the Bootheel has said so many times, place. It was not naivete that drove our culture, but actual, reinforced expectation of accomplishment and doing something right for all the right reasons.
            We had wonderful mentors.
            They spanned all quadrants of our lives. They were in the kitchens. They were at the filling stations. They were behind the meat counter in the stores. They were experts at fixing radiators and recaps, transmissions and clutches, and setting points and timing chains. They could shoe horses and calve heifers. They could grow wonderful gardens and they existed just fine with party lines.
            Most of them not only didn’t wear gloves they didn’t own a pair.
            They prescribed effective remedies without going to the drug store or the doctor. They painted our wounds with Merthiolate or Mercurochrome. They poured castor oil or Pepsi down us depending on how bad the belly ache might be.
            They whipped us when they ran out of patience or options.
            Most of our doctors were there when we were born. They knew us by our nicknames and normally diagnosed what we had before they saw us. They asked us in front of our mothers if we minded and cleaned our rooms. They made us feel like we might have some terminal disease if we did not perform those chores.
            We respected our teachers, and we were scared to death of our principals.
            We carried pocketknives from the time we were just little. A good number of us had a whet stone in our front pocket as well. Most of those were hand me downs from our grandfathers. They were polished slick from use. It was those same grandfathers who taught us how to make and keep those knives sharp.
            They taught how to shoot, too.
            We could drive by the time we were ten or 11. There are some of us who can remember driving even before that when those same grandfathers were spreading shocks of high gear out of the bed of the pickup. We were told to keep the truck straight as we steered without being able to touch the clutch, the brake, or the accelerator.
            Those were the best of times.
            The Story Tellers
            There is another missing link to today’s society and parts of this discussion.
            It comes from the time before television invaded and corrupted our lives. It was when we gathered as families for events and days of importance. The best of that part of generational bridging came later in the day or even the evening when we gathered in those much smaller living rooms and homes and were filled with wonder and awe as the stories were told.
            Center stage was held by the elders. It was their realm. It was their right.
As we know now, they were masters at that craft. They had no doubt been taught by their own elders in yet another, more distant past.
            Of course, those who know will have their own favorite stories, but those from the magic of the western past were always the highlights. The timeline of this generational epoch was from just after 1880 up until the night of the family gatherings ending in the mid ‘60s. There were cattle drives, lightning storms, horses, cows, cowboys, dudes, cow hunts, deer hunts, and wayward souls. There were wrecks and victories, and there was always at least a hint of inflected humor.
            The land itself was the backdrop, the stage, and our true home.
            We learned names of places, people, and horses we had never met or witnessed. The horizons were literally the horizons we had grown up within. Most of the enchanted listeners had never been far from our place of birth.
            We were taught, not by lesson, but by acclimation of verbal history that we lived in the best of all places. That was the place of our heritage. We would not violate the sanctity of it. We would defend it. Perhaps that is the difference in what we observe in our modern world and what the world once was. The clowns, the mentors, the story tellers, and ties to the land itself are all important.
            Just look around and observe their absence.

            Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico.

VIDEO: Send in the Clowns https://youtu.be/h9CbgSj8CdY

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