DIALECT STORIES TOLD IN TONGUES

Based on a particular vocabulary, all stories are dialect stories.

From Mark Twain to Forrest Gump, and every stop in between.

But what happens when language jumps off the page with directions, or recipes, or, wait for it:

Feelings?

First, let’s agree that we are a compilation of the people we’ve known and places we’ve been and use the knowledge gained to navigate our shared reality.

Does that sound right to you? This isn’t something shrouded in the fog of mystery.

Social evolution is part rubbing shoulders and part innovation.

Ride a NY subway any rush hour morning and you get both.

If you’re familiar with boomerpdx you know about rubbing shoulders, both the right and wrong way.

You respond to posts based on your personal history, based on what you know.

(Baby boomers should know more being older.)

What you also know is I don’t drop into dialect. Instead I use the tools on the workbench in front of me.

Without Ms Sally Spradlings typing class from sophomore year in high school I’d be much worse on the keyboard, like twenty words a minute instead or twenty-five.

Typing, combined with a speed reading course, set me on a career course as a history clerk, a museum cataloguer.

Writing about objects are dialect stories by themselves.

Museum writing advice from curators:

“Use as much technical jargon and microscopic material identification as possible. Make some jackass in the future do their work to use the object, otherwise leave it alone.”

Dialect Stories Told Between The Lines

I took a trip to the coast for an artifact pick up.

Boxes and pads and my lunch loaded into the Van of History, actually a plain white Chevy Suburban, and I was off.

The Rule of Museum Collection: Always take extra packing material. You never know what else the donor might want to give.

You know how it is when you think of the Oregon coast. It’s sand and headlands, sneaker waves hiding and horseback riding.

Does anyone think of family cows in soggy pastures?

I found the address I needed after driving up and down the same road, dodging a few loose cows along the way.

Two cows and one calf added up to too bad for some rancher.

Once I spotted the address I turned into the driveway to find a woman quick stepping toward me.

First, it was a hard to find address for someone who wasn’t anxious to advertise where they lived, and now a rushing woman?

I parked in the driveway near a yard that looked like a parking lot.

I hopped out, and introduced myself.

Lady: So good to meet you, but at the moment I’ve got a dire emergency.

A barn rose behind a fence to the left of the house. A wooden tool box sat near an open fence gate.

Lady: I was fixing the gate lock and my three cows escaped. Can you help?

I saw a distraught damsel in distress. Could I help? Could I cowboy the hell up for a cattle drive?

2

I arrived in the official museum collection uniform: slacks, shirt and tie, wearing a white lab coat. It helped people feel comfortable giving more than they’d planned.

Trotting after runaway cows in dress shoes waving a white lab coat had to help, too?

Me: Wait by the gate and I’ll be back.

Forty-five minutes later we sat at her kitchen table looking at the cast iron baking molds I was there to pick up.

I noticed a Native American theme in the room with arrowheads on the wall, wood carving on the shelves.

Lady: Do you enjoy West Coast Indian art?

Me: You got interesting pieces.

The lady stood and walked to a set of dark double pocket doors, slid them to each side and turned the lights on in the next room.

Lady: Then you may find this interesting.

She waved me in like a co-conspirator.

I jumped up.

Reading Between The Lines Of Dialect Stories

I had a Texas granddad who chewed a big cigar while he talked in his Texan accent.

I only saw him a few times.

He was famous for saying, “I like to change cars and wives more often than most men.”

My grandma was his first of seven wives. He had lots of visits to make.

Looking back, I think he chewed that cigar to hide his dialect stories.

I’d like to give him a pass, that he was doing the best he could.

But he had charisma he could have used to better effect.

How many ex-wives did he haunt all the way to their death bed? I know one.

How many kids spent a lifetime searching for the potential, the promise, of a positive male role model?

Everything was fine, but there was always something missing.

Those are dialect stories told in the key of sorrow.

Now try the dialect of hope.

PS: The Mark Twain tip is use fewer stage directions during dialogue.

. . . those artifices which authors employ to throw a kind of human naturalness around a scene and a conversation . . . . Some authors overdo the stage directions, [and] they elaborate them quite beyond necessity.