My daughter sometimes likes me to tell her Latin American folk tales as bedtime stories. I learned quite a lot of them while getting my Masters Degree in Latin American Studies at UCLA. There is one short story in particular that I remember, which I thought was a very effective way of teaching young people to respect and care for the elderly.
I’m sure somewhere on the web someone could find a better version of it than what I told her last night, but this is the story how I remember it:
“A family lives on a farm in rural Mexico and the grandfather lives with them. The grandfather is old and sickly and the family is struggling economically. Finally the father doesn’t feel that they can take care of the grandfather anymore, so he tells his son to get a shovel and to come with him into the forest.
“The father brings the old man into the forest, takes the shovel and clubs him with it from behind, killing him. Then the father and the son use the shovel to bury him and cover the hole.
“As the father and son are making their way out of the forest, the father notices that the boy is still carrying the shovel. The father says to the boy, ‘That’s an old shovel–you can just leave it here.’ The boy replies to his father:
“‘No, dad, I think I’d better keep it. I might need it someday.’”
[Late note: Apparently Linda Stofle of Bellflower [Los Angeles] California could have used this lesson. Today she was charged with murdering her 85-year-old widower father and burying him in her backyard. The most recent story about it is here–I just heard on the radio that she has now been charged.]
(The drawing above is of Dia de los Muertos/”Day of the Dead,” and doesn’t really have anything to do with my story, except that it is another aspect of Mexican folklore.)
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jackal1994 said,
I remember one particular crypt keeper short movie that I liked a lot. I didn’t know why I liked it but now I think I do.
The shortest version I can muster, there’s a logging camp and the owners wife is known to be a slut. Her husband was also known to be extremely jealous.
A young buck super-good looking chiseled jaw type arrives as a new logger. The wife keeps hitting on him all the time.
After repeated attempts he finally gives in. The husband comes in finds them entangled. He attacks the young guy with the axe striking him (with the blunt side) between the eyes. The young guy is struck blind.
(during the short one of the things the loggers would do for entertainment would be to compete sawing through super huge trunks with chainsaws for quickest time)
The ending cliffhanger shows the guys all cheering the blind guy on to cut a trunk with the chainsaw. As the scene pans out you see the husband and wife tied and gagged in a recess in the trunk (soon to be sawed by the blind guy).
That scene was cool in many ways (as a story) but what was most interesting is that neither the woman’s beauty (and she was super attractive), nor her gender enabled her to escape the tandem justice with her husband–as it should be.
May 23, 2008 at 10:41 am