One evening, several years ago, I was wandering along the midway at the Meade County Fair. I walked past the Ferris wheel and Tilt-A-Whirl. I walked along a row of booths. I saw the ring toss, the baseball throws, and the shooting gallery, all offering the possibility of winning huge stuffed animals. Then I saw the sign: “Fortunes Told. Past Lives Revealed. $1.”
My first thought? What a hoax! My second thought? Aaw, what the heck, why not?
So I paid my dollar and walked inside.
The woman who greeted me certainly knew how to dress the part. She wore layers of skirts and shawls. Gold bangle bracelets adorned her arms. Huge gold hoop earrings hung from her ears. A silky print scarf held her dark curly hair away from her face. She led me over to a table with a chair on each side. Even in the dim light, I could see the table was covered with at least three different printed tablecloths, each a bit smaller than the one beneath. On top a crystal ball rested on a deep midnight blue stand. She motioned me into one of the chairs, and she sat in the other. Well, I thought, I’m getting my dollar’s worth in costuming and decorating if nothing else.
The woman looked into my eyes. Then she stared into the crystal ball for what seemed like a very long time, although in reality it was probably well under a minute. When she looked up, her eyes looked troubled, even sad. And then she spoke, “I can’t see anything about your future,” she said, “but I do see your troubled past.”
Oh man, I thought, this is such a rip-off. Who doesn’t have some trouble in their past, and how convenient her crystal ball won’t reveal my future. What better way to discourage me from finding her at next year’s fair and proving her wrong!
“In your past,” she said, “and I mean in your past life, not the past of your current life.” She hesitated, then said, “I’m not sure how to tell you this, but you were a dog.”
“A dog?”
“Yes, and even worse, you were severely mistreated. In fact you were murdered. Shot.”
“Yeah, right. I was a dog, and I was shot,” I scoffed.
But she looked at me kindly. “I know this is not easy to believe, but you were shot, and even in this life your body bears the mark of the bullet.”
When she saw how skeptical I looked, she told me where the bullet struck me, and she was right. I’ve always had a strange indentation right here.
At this point in the story, I usually gesture to my collarbone, because there is an area there where I can make it look as though my finger is going into my skin a bit. I keep talking about that indentation, and how strange it was that she knew that. Usually one of my listeners asks to touch the spot. If no listener asks, I will add something like, “I know you may find this hard to believe, but the spot is right here. If you want to touch it, I don’t mind.” When someone from the audience comes up to touch the spot, the moment they touch me, I bark, fast and loud.
Yep, it’s a trick story. It works well one time with each small audience! It’s a fun story to tell, but it demands the teller be able to keep a very straight face and serious demeanor throughout the whole set-up.
I learned this story from Mr. Patrick Black, a math teacher at T. K. Stone Middle School in Elizabethtown, Hardin County, Kentucky. In January 2009, I was conducting a Kentucky Arts Council–supported arts residency with T. K. Stone sixth graders. One day I was eating lunch in the teachers’ lounge when Mr. Black walked in. He asked another teacher, Mrs. Jennifer Upchurch, “Has Jesse recovered from the story yet?” They both chuckled and began telling what had happened.
It seems Mr. Black had noticed that Mrs. Upchurch’s high school-age son, Jesse, had been doing his homework in her room every day after school. Jesse worked hard each afternoon, taking his studies very seriously. Mr. Black suggested to Mrs. Upchurch that he could walk in, tell her the story, and trick her son into touching the spot. Black knew he needed Upchurch cooperating in the set-up or Jesse would suspect a trick. (Mr. Black has a reputation for keeping things lively.) So, Black went to Upchurch’s room, talked about different things, and then steered the conversation to the incident in the story. As planned, Mrs. Upchurch touched the spot and commented on how strange it felt. That prompted her son to touch it too. Mr. Black reported that when he barked, Jesse’s math book flew one direction, his calculator flew another, and he jumped back against a desk with such force, it turned over too!
Mr. Black first heard this story in his mid-twenties on a triple date with friends on Halloween Eve. They were traveling from one haunted house to another. Mr. Black was driving, and one of the other fellows told the tale. While Mr. Black no longer remembers who told it, he does remember thinking—Mine! Immediately, he not only knew he wanted to retell the story to others, but he also had ideas about how he wanted to tell it.
The first time he remembers telling it was when he was a teacher on an eighth-grade class trip to Charleston, South Carolina. The students had been on a ghost walk and were riding back to their lodgings in a dark bus. To Mr. Black, they seemed primed for this story. He did not tell it to the entire bus, but just to a few eighth-graders sitting near him. He still remembers how they shrieked, and how in the dark he had not realized just how close the student’s hand was to his neck when he started barking—so close he almost bit it! Even now, Mr. Black is delightedly remorseful when he talks about the incident.1
Mr. Black and I use different details to pull our listeners into the story. I enjoy setting up how cynical I was about the prospect that someone could tell me anything about my future or past. As I mention details of the fortune teller’s booth, I can see my listeners sometimes nodding in agreement that she looks the part, and that revealing a “troubling past” is clever of her. When Mr. Black tells the story, he sets it up with some of his buddies encouraging him to see a palm reader. They’ve already had their palms read, and they think he should too. When he refuses to waste his money, his buddies insist on paying for him. The palm reader comments on Mr. Black’s having more than one life line—one line matching his current life, the other a short broken line indicating a previous life cut short. The palm reader eventually reveals that Black was once a dog who died from a gunshot. When Mr. Black refuses to believe her, she proves it to him by telling him where his scar is located. Both Mr. Black and I work to assure our listeners that, like them, we are not easily taken in. Then, when we appear to have heard something surprisingly true, our listeners are more willing to believe because, like them, we began as skeptics until we had the proof that turned us into believers.
Telling this tale has indeed been fun for me. I only tell it when I have a small audience, no bigger than a single class-sized group. One gift I’ve given my nieces and nephews is to visit their classrooms once a year to tell stories. My brother Alan’s children, two high school students and one fifth grader, all had me tell this story to their classmates shortly after they first heard me tell it at a family gathering. It really set up the story well when they suggested I “tell about what happened at the fair.” In a class of juniors at Franklin County High School, where my niece Kate was a student, so many volunteers wanted to touch the spot that I had to squelch an argument by promising they could take turns. By that time Kate’s eyes sparkled so much, I could no longer look at her for fear of breaking out laughing. The young man who touched first jumped back so quickly when I barked, he landed on the floor and slid backward across the room! Yes, I believe he intentionally exaggerated his reaction, but we all had a good laugh together, including the young man.
I’m lucky to have encountered Mr. Patrick Black, one of those natural storytellers who are also wonderful teachers. In fact, Mr. Black was Kentucky’s Middle School Teacher of the Year in 2003. I suspect the ability to tell a story serves him well in his classroom, even though this particular story is not likely to show up in mathematics class.