Category Archives: My Stories

my original and re-told tales

The Ox in the Flower Bed – a tale from a dream

by Christopher Agostino

 

The Rectory at the church was known for its beautiful gardens full of lovely flowers. One day the Rector was walking through the garden, muttering to himself so intently that he didn’t notice the ox standing in the flower bed until he’d run right into him.

“Oh, you miserable animal, trampling my flowers!” said the Rector, “what was our Lord thinking when he made such a ridiculous beast as you? You’re a heathen and a foul smelling one to boot. What are you doing in my flower bed, you monster?”

“Father,” said the ox, “the fields have lain so fallow that I was hungry, and I noticed that your beautiful flowers have been overgrown with clover. So I thought I’d eat the clover and clear the bed.”

“So you were hungry, the nerve of ya, with a gullet like that when aren’t you hungry, you awful thing you,” replied the Rector, ” and my lovely gardens ‘overgrown with clover’, you say. And why do I need you to be bringing me more to worry about, you giant lump of flesh, when I have my own troubles enough to keep me company. Like how am I to replace that leaky roof when the baskets come around half empty and so little money in the box? And who’ll be teaching the Latin Grammar now that Miss Willis has gotten herself in that way? And what about the trouble that rascal Michael is in, what will Father Timothy think when he hears of that? And sure that the garden has gone to pot with Bertie’s back in the state it’s in. What about that rattling window and that sticky door? And just how are the nuns going to keep a handle on Sarah and Tilly when those twins have a mind for mischief?…”

“Father,” interrupted the ox, “perhaps I can help a little bit.” And he lowered his head to resume munching the clover in the the flower bed.

“Ah, and it’s a great good friend to the church that you are, you marvelous creature you,” said the Rector, “would that more of my flock could see the task before them and set themselves to it. Ah, what a lovely day. Don’t the flowers smell wonderful?”

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The start of this story came in a dream, during the night of August 30, 2009. I dreamt I was performing at something like a library and I finished a long story and said I’m going to end with a tale about an unusual animal. Kids started calling out guesses, I told them they’d never guess it, because it is a musk ox. Then I duck out of the room to the hall where Lorraine is in another room and I ask her to tell me the story of the musk ox. She relays a tale that starts like this one, with the ox in a flower bed and a character like the priest complaining, but her story has no ending – so I don’t know what to do as I need to go back to the audience, which is when I woke. It was early morning. I thought about it in bed to craft the complete tale and, even though I fell back asleep, I remembered it upon getting up and wrote it down. I keep a composition book by my bedside because I can sometimes snatch useful bits of story or visual images out of dreams.

When I sat down to write it out as a story I did some quick research and discovered that the Musk Ox is found mostly way up in the Artic Circle – so I turned him into just a regular ox.

Via Google Image search, from a website promising that their "Musk Ox pictures are updated on a daily basis." Free-extras.com

What Was He to Do? – a folktale — storytelling

a traditional tale retold by Christopher Agostino ©2011

While traveling from one town to another on business, two merchants were stranded when the bus they were on broke down. The bus driver stayed with his vehicle hoping someone would come by to help, but the men knew it was a very lonely road and thought they would walk on to the next town instead. After walking for several hours they hadn’t seen a soul, and they began to feel tired and hungry. They started looking for a good place to bed down for the night and wished they had something to eat. Then they saw a peasant with a pack on his back coming towards them from the other direction.

The two merchants stopped the peasant and asked him if he had any food to sell. All the peasant had was a cup of dried beans he was saving to cook for his breakfast. Really only enough food for one, but he probably would have shared it with the two men except that they asked if they could buy it, so what was he to do?

The peasant asked them how much money they had. The two merchants conferred, and it turned out they only had 10 centavos between them, as they didn’t carry much money when they went out into the countryside for fear of being robbed. Since they were business men dealing with a peasant they only offered 5 centavos for the beans. It wasn’t a lot of money for the peasant’s only meal, but money was money and he could always use a little more of it, so what was he to do? The peasant agreed and they made the exchange.

Since the beans were dry, the merchants needed water to soak them before cooking, and asked the peasant if knew where there was any. He told them he had passed a stream a few miles back, but the merchants were too tired to walk any further. Instead they conferred again and offered the peasant their last 5 centavos if he would go and fetch the water for them. Well, he probably would have gotten them the water anyway, but since they offered to pay him for it, what was he to do? He took their money and set off for the water.

He came back with the water and all the men had a drink, then the merchants wanted to get the beans soaking so they would be ready to cook for their breakfast in the morning. But then they realized they needed a pot in which to soak and cook the beans. Now, the peasant had just such a pot in his pack, as he often had to cook for himself as he made his way through the countryside, and he told the two merchants. With no more money in their pockets, the only thing the merchants could think of doing was offering the peasant a share of the beans in exchange for the use of his pot. So the peasant took the beans back from them and set them to soak, what was he to do?

Later, the peasant went off to get some wood for a fire. Left to talk, the two merchants decided that one cup of beans was not enough to share amongst three, so they devised a way to trick the peasant out of his share. When the peasant came back they said that since there was so little food it would really only be right if the worthiest among them was the one to get to eat. And when the peasant asked how they should decide who was so worthy the two merchants said they should let God decide. They would each go to sleep, and let God come to them in their dreams, and whoever had the holiest of dreams should be the one to eat the beans. Well, since they were two to his one, what was he to do? The peasant agreed.

It wasn’t the best of nights for the merchants sleeping on the hard ground with their stomachs rumbling from hunger, but they looked forward to the meal in the morning and trusted in their plan to fool the peasant out of his share. They woke to see the peasant already up and dressed. The two hungry merchants set about right away to tell of their dreams.

The first merchant said, “I saw the three of us standing by the side of the road when an angel came down and looked at me. He saw how worthy I was and put a silver cloak upon my shoulders, then the angel lifted me up and I rose on silver wings to be with God in heaven.”

The second merchant spoke next and said, “I saw the three of us standing by the side of the road when an angel came down and looked at me. He saw how worthy I was and put a golden cloak upon my shoulders, then the angel lifted me up and I rose on golden wings to be with God in heaven.”

Then the two merchants turned to look at the peasant, who said, “This is most remarkable. It is as if we all had the same dream. For I also dreamed that the three of us were standing by the side of the road. And I could hardly believe it when two angels came down from the sky and put a cloak on each of your shoulders. Then as I watched both of you rose right up into the sky and disappeared. God had decided you both were worthy, and there was I, left all alone by the side of the road. So I cooked the beans and ate them, what was I to do?”

I wrote this after reading “The Three Dreams” in Latin American Folktales, edited by John Bierhorst, Pantheon Press. That version is credited to Luis Arturo Hernandez Castaneda of Guatemala (but the notes don’t say whether it is from a book by him or a story he told that someone else recorded) and has the tale as two students in a city trying to outsmart an Indian, by pooling their money with his to buy some rice with the plan to trick him out of it via a dream. Two upper class people trying to trick a lower class person via a dream is a motif in folktales from various cultures, identified as motif type: “AT 1626 Dream Bread”

I retained only the basic structure for my version here, changing the characters, the setting and the sequence of events.

StoryFaces: The Power of a Story — reading and telling your own stories

by Christopher Agostino

StoryFaces: The Power of a Story
Folktales, Fables and Adventure Tales in a celebration of why we tell stories.
A special version of my StoryFaces performance for schools and libraries to get kids reading more and telling their own stories.

StoryFaces: The Power of a Story is a special program of traditional and original tales exemplifying why such stories survive, and what they can still teach us today — to encourage kids to find stories that relate to their lives and to tell their own stories about their dreams and aspirations. The power of a story is an essential expression of human consciousness: to understand ourselves better by learning about others, to reach forward into the future through what we pass on to our children and to take control of who we are and all we dream of becoming by the story we make of our own lives.

StoryFaces: The Power of a Story is a 45 – 60 minute performance for school aged children and family audiences. The performance includes a range of stories from Aesop Fables to adventures like “The Tiger that Went to the House of the Sun”, with variable content for different ages, plus a brand new story created specifically for this Summer’s Library Reading  theme to get kids thinking about what they could do to Build A Better World for everyone:  “The Storyteller and the Magic Fish”
There is also an available follow-up activity in which participants create an original story in which they are the star through a drawing exercise and writing:
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This article is part of the teacher’s guide I send to schools, explaining my approach in the assembly program. For a printable pdf of this article, click on this link: Tshow_TeacherGuide_PowerOfAStory

What is the Power of a Story?

Who won the race, the tortoise or the hare? We all know the answer, and with it an intrinsic reminder about the value of perseverance. This is why such stories survive. The traditional function of folktales is still effective today: to pass wisdom and cultural information on to children via entertaining stories they will remember (and repeat to their children). We remember stories. They are the building blocks of memory. Current memory research says that we are always telling ourselves the stories of our own lives, repackaging our experiences into stories to retain and recall them, and, importantly, how we re-write those experiences effects the choices we make when presented with similar opportunities in the future — so even our personal stories serve to retain life-lessons in the same way as Aesop’s Fables do.

The power of a story also resides in its ability to inspire the listeners and elevate their understanding of what they can achieve beyond their personal experiences, as in the Native American tale of the mouse who becomes an eagle through his acts of compassion, or the ancient Chinese tale of the brave maiden Li Chi who slays the dragon then chastises the spirits of the maidens sent to sacrifice before her for not taking care of the dragon themselves. Taking control of our life through the story we make of it is the essential lesson of the hero tale.

Hero tales are the original Motivational Programs, designed and time-tested to inspire positive behavior and exemplify attributes such as courage, perseverance, intelligence and self-sacrifice. These types of tales are especially important for older kids and teenagers to hear as they begin to deal with personal responsibility and the emotional turmoils of life, questioning who they are and seeing themselves as either victims or heros in a challenging world. Folktales also allow for ways to discuss real life more abstractly, through parables and imaginary characters, so that a story can approach difficult subjects without being too personal.

Young people need to hear stories, both traditional folktales and original life stories, not only for their ability to pass on received wisdom but also for the insight they give kids into understanding the story of their own life, into taking control of how they write that story. Beginning with the concentration skills that develop from listening to stories, the ability to parse the essence of the story within a folktale, anecdote, life experience, etc., engages higher reasoning and comprehension skills that can be applied directly to writing, reading and all forms of problem solving.

When I am telling a story to an audience, what I am listening to is their silence — when the audience is silent I know they are experiencing the story for themselves, living it. It is becoming their story too. In that silence I recall that this is something we humans have done from our very beginning. The power of a story is an essential expression of human consciousness: to understand ourselves better by learning about others, to reach forward into the future through what we pass on to our children and to take control of who we are and all that we dream of becoming.

StoryFaces_Video-playTitle1

See the video: What Is A StoryFace?

“I am a painter and a storyteller, and this is how I tell my tales. StoryFaces is an innovative performance in which I paint the faces of audience volunteers to illustrate the stories as I tell them.”

learn about Christopher’s Stories

learn about all we do at: agostinoarts.com

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