Millie Creightonabsence of the storyteller from the story? And what about that little
white line “do-hickey” that runs across your eye? Is that from age, is
it genetic, or did it have anything to do with...? (It would be a few
years later, while doing work in conjunction with the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the atomic bombings for a special symposium organized by
Alan Wolfe at the University of Oregon, that I would read about the
“classic cataract” effect experienced by many bomb survivors. I think
it likely that this explained the eye, but cannot confirm this, because I
was being the good bad ethnographer, and thus did not ask this ques-
tion that the solely good ethnographer likely would have, and thus
did not pin down the facts on this one.)
At the beginning of this story–yarn, I mentioned Wolcott’s discussion
of our difficulties with questions. Wolcott points out that sometimes we
bring our own cultural “baggage” about what can and cannot prop-
erly be brought up in conversation. Wolcott writes, “Question-asking
is culturally-specific; we follow our own implicit rules in the absence
of anything better to guide us” ( 1999 , 56 ). Sometimes, Wolcott ar-
gues, this is based on restrictions in our own culture, and it might be
possible to discover that more can be asked than we imagined (Wol-
cott 1999 , 56 ). I think something a little different was happening in
the interaction described above. It can also be valid sometimes to al-
low oneself not to ask certain questions even if one knows one can.
Finally, there was Unasked Unquestion # 5. Although never asked,
at least orally, this one seemed clearly present during the telling of
the tale. It was related to the unquestion of the distancing of story-
teller from the story. It was not just the unquestion mentioned above,
“where were you?” but the unquestion “where are you?” At the end
of the story about the woman who lost her two little boys to death
and learned she did not have the power to keep them in life, this un-
question was there as a presence. It was in me, in the air, in the in-
betweenness of us, storyteller and story receiver. As the unquestion
hung between us, so likely did a look, and to that look the storyteller
answered the unquestion, without actually answering it. In her fi-
nal mention of the woman who had to accept that her two sons had
died, her look met mine, and her response to my unasked unquestion
brought her back to the story and back into a direct relationship to