A Storyteller's Introduction

By the time we registered for workshops at the University of Iowa, the college hotel was booked. One downtown where we had stayed previously offered the same rate, plus complementary van service to the campus. So we took a comfortable room close to restaurants and a 10-minute ride to classes.
First morning, a Sunday, one of the two elevators stopped elevating. Big wedding party scattered among the six floors decided to go home at the moment of the failure. I came in the lobby from a walk as the mob of recovering celebrants shuffled out of the service stairway, carrying bags instead of plastic cups of champagne of the night before.
Through the door in top form from the cool morning walk, the twirling of my walking stick cast such a windmill shadow in front of the reception desk that one ol’ boy shied so far off course, his roll-on spun into a deep, screeching wheelie. I considered comforting the lad, but remembered how long a fit lasted for a hot-blooded colt fearful of shadows.
Twirling a walking stick goes back to walking in Mertzon before all the town dogs started sleeping indoors and stopped biting walkers outdoors. The shadowmaker I carried in the hotel came from the lost and found closet. The cane or stick wasn’t a cane or a stick at all, but an abandoned piece of telescoping aluminum tube for short-statured lightweights applying for disability benefits, or caught in a tight corner and needing a walking stick for a stage prop.
On purpose, I leave mine home. By the time I pack different weight clothes, rain coat, sunscreen, parasol, chap stick, extra shoelaces, and maybe a sewing kit, passing through inspection feels like an imposition on the government agents. Asking the inspectors to scan a walking stick, plus my other necessities like arch supports and corn pads, files and clippers, inhalants and eye drops, dental flosses and pastes, and ammonia swabs and chloroform patches to meet emergencies, seems too much.
Descending the four flights of stairs earlier allowed time to review the best places to borrow a walking stick. Underneath bar stools is one spot where they are forgotten. Streetcars and buses net a few. Old grannies grow careless in casinos and at horse races but are poor losers and the worst of sports, if you are caught nicking one. It was a stroke of good fortune finding the cane in the lost and found after weighing the possibilities.
The first class met after indoctrination on Sunday afternoon. The University of Iowa writing workshops rank among the best in the country. The catalogue listed my class as “The Art of Metaphors.” Omitted was the fact that course attracted students experienced in launching rockets, medicine, research, law, libraries and education.
As each person gave an opening resume, the reason I was admitted became clear. I was admitted to make the rolls well rounded, to add a common country touch — the old Norman Rockwell, Carl Sandburg “aw shucks” flavor. Heartland America mixed into urban sophistication to balance the roles, to bring out true democracy in the classroom.
Self-introduction to an unknown audience is too much temptation for a storyteller. I was already using my full first name, Montgomery, for a dodge to keep folks from thinking I was saying “Bob” for “Monte.” Further, Oscar Wilde warned, “Keep telling the truth and it’ll catch up with you.”
Twenty-five years — no, longer — ago, I learned not to admit to being a journalist, or more precisely, a scribe at a livestock journal. Writers unable to parse the syntax of Mary Had A Little Lamb scorn newspaper people.
The rocket scientist drew the most attention. He admitted that President Reagan ending the Cold War ruined his career at Cape Canaveral blasting off rockets. When the busybody of a peacemaker, (my version) Mr. Reagan, made a pact with the Russians, he lost his job to shower the heavens in explosives.
Second was a guy who majored in cell research. Like many students, he wanted to write his memoirs, except in non-technical language. As my turn came closer, ideas arose like offering to ghost a treatise for the cell guy and the rocket shooter. Offer a deal in the most commonplace language away from and outside the dock workers’ hall in Galveston, Texas.
At my time, I lowered my head a bit. Said, “I’m Montgomery Noelke from the eastern edge of the Chihuahua Desert in Texas.” Raised my head. Continued in deeper dialect: “Ah raise sheep and cows, git my mail at Mertzon, fear the Almighty, and trap coyotes for extra income.”
The teacher replied, “Thank you, Mr. Nolek. Class dismissed.” The classroom door was a lot further walking back than coming. Can’t say whether my classmates grew quieter as I passed, as my hearing isn’t that acute.

Remembering the Fifth Grade

For years after Miss Greengoss disappeared, parents speculated on whether she drew the fifth grade classes of 1938, ‘39 and ‘40 by the old black bean curse. Folks thought that after drawing those brutes three times in a row, she bolted for an assignment overseas or maybe joined a mystic religious order to seek peace in a cell.
On the flight to writers’ workshops at the University of Iowa in Iowa City last month, the thought hit that my final chance to learn to write links to Miss Greengoss. Above the roar of the plane, her words drilled through: “Do your best, be the task be bringing in the coal or dumping the ashes. Stand tall for the only time you head the class to dust the erasers, clean the blackboards and line the chalk trays, as if the Board of Trustees watches and waits for the chance to reward your work.”
Traveling by jet in a leather seat with a dark plaid lap blanket to go to school was mighty different than walking across the courthouse hill from a highway drop-off after sharing a shared ride from the ranch with a neighbor. The snowflakes pelting my skimpy jacket in winter; the rains drenching my faded denim shirt in the spring.
We flew from San Angelo and changed planes in Dallas/Fort Worth to be on the ground in Cedar Rapids in six hours and ride the bus over to Iowa City. On the bus, a case of classroom fright struck so severe that the force of racking body spasms and deep chest hiccups twisted the seat belt over my chest. The driver watched through a big mirror with the same suspicion bus drivers once wore in the World War II days when college students brought a pint on board hidden in a raincoat, except the mean age of these college students exceeded the driver’s age by at least 20 years.
Right then I began to dread hobbling to class with bright youngsters flipping off brilliant copy on laptops, promising lads waiting for a Fullbright to come, or Oxford to start a new term. Gifted, vigorous, alert, talented — all combined to craft deft essays, musical poems, winning short stories and masterful plays.
Unloaded and up to our room, I left my bag packed. Shocked by my reflection in the bathroom mirror, the image read: “Nothing but a blackboard-washing, coal-shoveling, ash-dumping, eraser-dusting cowboy from Mertzon. Three years in the fifth grade, walking to and from the coal bin to be back in the room in time to sit on the last row, in the last seat, by the far window, hidden by a standing map rack and a long stovepipe going through the ceiling.”
Turning from the mirror, I told my pal I was catching the night bus back to Texas.
First time she heard this kind of talk happened at Natalie Goldberg’s workshops in Taos, New Mexico. Instead of planning to ride the bus home, I threatened to move to a smoke-blackened adobe mud hogan by a creek lined with fallow willow trees, the dry leaves and rotten limbs floating into dead water. To never talk or write again, except in sign and pidgin. To sit by the hogan door, draped in a frazzled buffalo robe winter and summer, morning and evening, to pay silent homage to the Great Spirit at sunrise and at sundown, midnight and midday.
She responded in New Mexico to my returning to the wild by making reservations for dinner for three nights for the two of us.
Two summers ago in Iowa, she worked a crossword puzzle to kill time as I vowed to enroll in embalming and undertaking school. All caused from staring at a class assignment marked, underlined, circled, and punctuated, in red and black marks to a colored series of insults and intimidation glaring enough to break the spirit of the biggest egotist to ever march the halls of the Congress of this United States of America.
Maybe she knows, but I can’t remember, the reaction to going back to the ranch for good, the night before leaving for the University of the South. Oh yes! She made me a lunch to carry on the plane. The reason I remember was that she made egg salad sandwiches.
Making the registration time for classes interrupted the speech. Once at the gathering at the student center, the average age passed a tad over 50, perhaps a bit higher, as a grayhair dominated the tables, restoring my confidence.
All the registering was completed previously by e-mail and charged on credit cards. The lady checking in the “N’s” looked familiar. She asked each student whether they wanted a free book satchel or free tee shirt. Before I uttered a word, she said, “Better give him a tee shirt.” Thus reopened my career as a student at the exact mark where I left off in the final semester of the fifth grade.