My last News From the Road was about politics. A few friends and family contacted me, all in the form of email.

Last Tuesday, I was staying at Camp Loucon, a Methodist camp and retreat in Kentucky. I spoke to my mom by cell phone. The camp doesn’t have phones or television or internet access.

Mom is 93 years old.

When she was two weeks old her family went to the French Tract in New Mexico to homestead. They traveled by wagon. Uncle Herb walked and herded cows along the way. He was probably six or seven at the time.

Anyway, to speak with mom I have to walk up the hill from the cabin at Camp Loucon to the football field at the top of the hill to get a cell phone signal. Mom has adjusted to this admirably.

"Are you up on the hill?" she asks as if it is the most natural thing in the world.

I am reminded that while we have sent men to the moon we still have people on earth living in stone age conditions. Civilization is a relative thing, as are cell phones.

For mom, civilization means you start by going to New Mexico in a wagon. and wind up flying there in a commercial jet ninety years later. One trip takes days -- even weeks. The other just a few hours.

We have grown so used to being instantly in touch that Ben, a recreation specialist here at Camp Loucon, tells me he had a group of high school kids waiting to assault the ropes course who found out, as I did, that high places provide cell phone access. He looked up from his instruction to see half of them using their cell phones to message their friends.

Messaging friends in Mom’s teenage years on the French Tract meant going to a dance -- with all your family -- and trying to find time to sneak a few private moments. Instant access meant waiting from week to week to talk with your friends.

Mom is a storyteller. She got this from her mother and from her father -- the ones we called Mom and Pop. Pop used to read Shakespeare to his family. He had an eighth grade education -- obviously a more thorough eighth grade education than one would expect today. (Do we even study Shakespeare anymore?)

Perhaps instead of No Child Left Behind we should insist that the norm be No Poet Left Behind. That is probably too much to hope for.

Pop read Shakespeare because the plays were good stories and because he had a mother and aunts who were teachers. Mom, Uncle Herb, Uncle Ben and Aunt Georgia listened to him because they had no instant access, no messaging friends from a retreat in the wilderness!

Entertainment takes time and it takes concentration. Time and concentration are things to be valued. Concentration and time are missing from our lives. We can not replace them with instant messaging. Having something to say and making time to say it are not lost arts but they are vastly under appreciated and underused.

Lest I begin to sound like Aristotle railing against the young let me point out that mom’s family liked Pop’s stories. They looked forward to them. When they fell asleep before they were done, at breakfast they would plead to know how the story came out. Pop wouldn’t tell them. He would finish the story that night. Once again, no instant access, no instant messaging.

And, Pop told stories about growing up in Tennessee, about traveling, about carving a roast beef for Teddy Roosevelt. After years of listening to Pop tell stories, Mom learned them and passed them on.

She learned to value stories. She refined her own experience in stories. She tells them as her mother did -- over and over. Sometimes I think I know the end. Usually I do not.

My grandmother taught me that people define themselves with the stories they tell. She was a traveler -- at first in wagons, later, as the wife of a trucking company owner, by car and truck. She saw me as a traveler, too.

When she was in the nursing home and I thought she didn’t know me, she told me her story about being caught in a snow storm in Texas. She had pulled into a motel and rented a room. The motel, like Camp Loucon, had no room phones.

The family was worried because she was in her eighties and because they knew she was traveling in the storm. They had not heard from her. I told them she probably had gotten into a motel and would be all right.

We identified each other with that story. When grandmother repeated it to me in the nursing home I knew she knew who I was. I told her I was on my way to New Mexico and she reached farther back in time.

"Have you got a good team?" she asked.

You should never stop someone from telling a story you have already heard. First of all you may not have heard them tell it. Secondly, you may not have heard them tell it today. Finally, they are going to tell it anyway so you might as well enjoy it.

Stories are performances. Sometimes we’re audience. Sometimes performers, sometimes we’re both.

The first story about my mother is about traveling to New Mexico in a wagon. There are other stories about seeing the Cap Rock, about herding live stock, about taking produce to market, about starting a trucking company to compete with the train to deliver produce in Raton, about pulling up stakes and using those trucks to start an oilfield trucking company in Tulsa during the oil boom in the 1920‘s.

The stories are not about homesteading and plowing the land.

We are drivers of cars and trucks and wagons. We are riders of ships and planes, ox carts and trains, rickshaws, canoes, subways and elephants. As an eleven year old child I was even carried by a Sherpa in a basket up the foothills of the Himalayas.

And, we use our traveling skills.

My Mom tells a story about using her driving skills at a young age to thwart an amorous suitor. He was a dandy. He got her in the car and started making advances. She "oohed" and "awed" over his car until he agreed to let her drive. He thought he’d be able to snuggle closer if she was driving.

In the parlance of my 1950’s generation, she pealed out scattering gravel behind the car and causing the suitor to grasp his amorous hands in a white knuckled grip on the door handle.

Having driven since she was a mere child, Mom slid around corners, careening to a halt in front of her house. Saying something like, "Nice car" she jumped out and ran inside.

At a recent party mom was asked what she thought the year 2000 would be like when she was young. Newspaper columns written about centenarians use this question. Usually there is a humorous sound byte in response. Mom didn’t answer.

I don’t know if Mom imagined cell phones and instant messaging when she was a girl on the French Tract or even contemplated the year 2000.

Mom grew up to see much of the world. She saw technology in its infancy grow into adolescence. What she has experienced doesn’t include instant messages and sound bytes. Hers is a journey that I sometimes think, at the age of ninety three, is just getting started.

Somewhere there is an aboriginal person looking up at the night sky as I am. It is quite possible that he has a cell phone. It is even possible that he is calling his mother to check in.

Tonight as I talked to mine, a satellite carved a path across a clear, cold sky. My aboriginal friend and I share the same sky, possibly the same satellite.

Our mothers have seen changes that we can only imagine.

Motels still provide a home away from home, but like my dad before me, I weaned myself from vaudeville.

My dad started his career as an itinerant performer. He worked for the Sewell Theatre company out of Atlanta, Georgia. His job was to go from town to town organizing theatrical performances. He would go into a small town and cast and rehearse a play using local people -- lots of kids and star struck young adults. He would take up the ticket money and leave town, sometimes before the show was over, to do the whole thing over again some place else.

Later, he transferred these skills into a full time teaching job in Tulsa, Oklahoma at Kindle Elementary School. He taught Auditorium.

I have taken the other track.

I started teaching at the University of Omaha, Nebraska. At Kentucky Southern College, I was a one-man theatre department -- teaching an upper level version of Auditorium -- for two years. When the college went bankrupt, I was forced to become a performer -- something I have done successfully for over twenty five years.

Now, I spend most of my time in schools. We (that is the students and I) write plays, build and play dulcimers, learn to play guitar, write and perform stories and songs --- Auditorium again!

At Sewell Middle School in Bremen, Georgia, the school’s curriculum coordinator was a woman named Sewell. We got to talking about our backgrounds and I discovered that she was the niece of the Sewell’s who owned the theatre company my dad worked for almost seventy years ago.

So, dad did theatre for a couple of years and then taught school for forty two. He taught every level from grade school until he retired as the head of the art department at Southwest Missouri State University.

I taught at the college level for three years, then spent the rest of my time as a traveling performer -- Vaudeville if you will. As an example of six degrees of separation, we both worked for the same people -- a generation and years apart.

Sometimes when I check into a really old hotel, I wonder if dad has been there too. If not him, some other itinerant performer probably has.

This month I am in Caneyville, Kentucky. The fourth grade students will be writing a play about local history. A couple of students will find a trunk filled with letters. The letters will be from generations of people in Kentucky writing to tell people what happened here. So far, it is exciting.

Oh, the motel this time is a 500 acre Methodist camp. I have a cottage beside a lake, not too far from a golf course. Not too shabby, eh?