Story Swap

This month's Voices in the Glen story swap was at Penelope's house. Despite having been there before (and having been in the general vicinity several other times), I managed to fail to notice a critical step in the directions and found myself driving from Vienna to Alexandria via Maryland. Oops! Since I'd left myself plenty of time (precisely because I know my sense of direction), I wasn't very late. I will also note that her neighborhood re-validated my theory of Virginia road signs. Namely, if they ever accidentally put up a sign that might be helpful, they plant a tree immediately in front of it so you can't read it.

It was a pretty small but lively gathering. I told a story that I categorized as a camel story, even though it doesn't actually have a camel in it. It worked well enough that I think I can get away with it at an upcoming event (along with a couple of camel stories that do have camels in them). Bill said he'd look up other camel stories for me and mentioned Kipling's as the obvious one. "Do you like Kipling?" he asked.

I, of course, replied, "I don't know. I've never kippled." Surprisingly, two of the other people present had never heard that before.

I managed to get home without getting lost, by the way.

Follow-up on Camels

So Bill sent me an email with a list of camel stories, thanks to his extensive database. (He indexes folktale books.) There are lots I don't know, but two on his list were in books I have. One of those is a book he borrowed from me to index, in fact. (It's a collection of Mongolian folktales that I bought in the state department store in Ulan Baator.)

It really should have occurred to me that Idries Shah would have some camel stories, too. While I'm at it, I should also see if there are any camel-related stories among the Tales of Joha, since those are closely related to the Nasruddin stories.

I should probably also time the other stuff I plan to use so I don't have camels dominate the whole program. I just wanted to show off my lovely camel puppet.