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Nothing like a folk tale to engage imaginations and enlarge the world around us—Such is the Brothers Grimm’s Town Musicians of Bremen (1819), still enjoyed by young hearts, six years old or ninety.
The story begins with an aging donkey, decrying his master’s displeasure over his slowness in pulling the cart to market. Rather than face probable death, the donkey flees to Bremen where he will become a musician.
On the road he meets a weary dog, fire thinning his bones. No longer able to hunt, he fears being put down by his master. But the donkey’s invitation to make music sparks his interest and he climbs onto his back.
Next they meet a cat with a face “like three rainy days.” She fears her mistress’s
drowning, because blunted teeth prevent her from catching mice in their cottage. She, too, joins them.
Then a rooster crowing with all its might causes them to pause along the road. They learn that cook will cut off his head and prepare him for tomorrow’s dinner. He, too, welcomes the invitation and they continue on toward Bremen.
Although the story contains other adventures, I want to focus upon the four friends, so human in their fears of aging and the specter of death. Happily, the donkey sees beyond his fate and chooses an alternative: making music for others. So inspired he is that others choose similarly and climb onto his back and head for Bremen where everyone loves music.
It’s about discovering and developing meaning in life that keeps us fresh—even living with a terminal illness. I have found it so.
“I write to shine a light on an otherwise dim or even pitch-black corner, to provide relief for myself and others.” Words taped to the desk of the memoirist, Laura Munson, author of This Is Not the Story You Think It Is – a Season of Unlikely Happiness (2011).
Housewife and mother, she had managed to write fourteen novels that failed to attract the notice of publishers. Yet, she continued honing her skills until the sea-change called for a different tack.
Stung by an unforeseen marital crisis, Laura reaches for her journal and writes over a five-month period—jottings that later become raw material for a memoir. Her readers she calls “gentle friends.”
Backstories of her twenty-year marriage, their two children, and life in a farmhouse in a Montana glacial valley open the memoir. In the writerly process, Munson explores her own darkness, especially her nasty inner critic, “Sheila, her twin sister.”
Graced by grandmothers practiced in creating beauty in their homes, Laura does similarly in her vegetable and flower gardens: her response to her children’s needs and her mate’s identity crisis, as provider, triggered by a failed business venture.
Humor and honesty, the hallmarks of successful memoirs, are found in this one.
This Is Not the Story You Think It Is – a Season of Unlikely Happiness was listed on the New York Times Best Sellers List, and was promoted by Oprah and the Today Show. With its writing, Laura Munson changed.
The year was 1786, the setting, Boston’s Bunch of Grapes tavern where former officers from the War of Independence gathered. Among them was the Reverend Manasseh Cutler, with doctorates in medicine, law, and divinity. Such opens David McCullough’s historical novel, The Pioneers—The Heroic Story Of The Settlers Who Brought The American Ideal West (2020).
Besides writing of notables in American history, McCullough wanted to present patriots, unknown to history, whose critical influence directed its development. One of these was the Reverend Manasseh Cutler (1742-1823), First Congregationalist pastor in Ipswich Hamlet, Massachusetts. His vision for the Northwest Territory (north and west of the Ohio River) included the prohibition of slavery, the freedom of religion, and state-funded public education, all of which occurred, despite bitter disputes in the Capitol.
McCullough’s discovery of the archives at Marietta College, located in Marietta, Ohio—the first settlement of the pioneers—gave him access to the diaries and letters of Manasseh Cutler and four other families, together with newspapers, pamphlets, and other books. All of which the author wove into a compelling story of ingenuity and daunting hardships: the virgin terrain to clear for log cabins and farms, the extremes of weather, diseases and accidents, clashes with Chief Pike of the Seminoles, the British threat during the War of 1812, and the lack of funds, also in the country, as a whole.
Despite such hardships, the settlers, many from Puritan backgrounds, rarely gave up. Just got up the next morning and saw what was left and started over.
Knowledge of their perseverance attracted thousands of American and European settlers wanting to experience this world of rich soils with their bountiful produce. Live was different here.
David McCullough, now in his mid-eighties, keeps alive the innate goodness of America’s foundation and development in his historical novels and reminds us to be grateful for our heritage.
Heart Whisperings 