re: #353 CleverToad

I’ve been thinking a lot about you, HW-that-was, in this season of unwelcome changes for you. About your love of family, for your grandmother and your niece, your fascination with family history and the stories of the past. You are a link — perhaps one of the things you might do is to make a record of your place in the chain. Write down the stories your elders told you: the story itself as you remember hearing it; your memories of hearing the story told, your memories of the person telling it. Doesn’t have to be polished or perfect, just get it on record, be it paper or pixels. You can go back and add notes about things you learn from other family members or in your research that add context to the events. Get it all down somewhere — others in the family might know the stories, but no one else has your memories or feelings about it. If you are comfortable recording yourself, you could do some of it that way; maybe get your parents to sit down and tell their stories with a videocamera running while they’re still here to ask.

Then tell the stories to your niece and others of her generation. She can go back and look at the written record later too, but she’ll have the memory of hearing it from you to strengthen the link.

You can keep adding over the years, but preserve what you know now because memory fades. That’s what I’m dealing with now, trying to remember things my mother told me, my grandmother told me. Wishing I’d made a lot of notes over these last four years while I was home with her, because she talked a lot about the past and I’m struggling to remember the details. All of us kids are in our 60’s now and senioritis is setting in. We have some cassette tape recordings of our grandmother talking that I need to get digitized, just hoping the tape will still play. We have several videos of my mom talking that we need to pull together and pass out copies. Hoping to get things to where her grandkids can go back and look at things in the future.

Family matters so much to you. Hope that — along with baseball and lit and music and travel — helps you along in this tough stretch of the trail.

Wow, thanks for the kind words. Much appreciate it. I definitely wish I had taken some notes on what my Grandmother and other grandparents and the other older generations I’ve talked to. My belief is that even though I believe in thinking forward is the best path, we still can learn from the older generations. When I eulogized my grandmother, I really had to give some tribute also to her immigrant parents. There were some immigrants in attendence at the service- some of my mom’s friends and also my SiL and her family. I like engaging with people with different backgrounds. I’ve never liked to put myself in any box. I definitely have so called jock interests, nerd interests, and geek interests, and I try to learn more. Right now I’m reading a Ben Franklin bio. It’s been a very trying past year for me but I’m trying to get myself back on track mentally and honestly spiritually too even though I id as agnostic.