Month: July 2014
We all share a responsibility to record our family narratives
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Do you know where your parents met? Do you know the story of your birth? Do you know where your grandparents grew up? You should. It’s part of your enduring family story.
I blame my mother. She’s the one who got this memoir stuff started several years ago. It’s almost like she continues to chide me from the grave to continue her passion for family storytelling. Now that my own memoir is launching Aug. 7, I find myself thumbing through her personal saga to find reinforcement for my efforts. Some of her words have been imprinted on my heart and spur me in encouraging others to tackle this monumental but necessary task. She wrote:
Seldom will the voices of our ancestors sing to us from the grave unless we listened to their songs while they were alive. Each generation is bound up in the composition of its own symphony. Those of us who fail to recognize that the underlying theme has already been laid down by our parents and grandparents will likely pen many discords before our music ends. It is almost certain that our children and grandchildren are not much interested in our composition. When they are finally ready, chances are we will not be here to sing the song of our life. It is therefore vital to record the stanzas as they were written. It is our legacy and our responsibility.
I recall Mother’s early research efforts for the telling of our family story. I called her Motorcycle Mama because she learned to ride a motorcycle when she was in her late 50s. The following column I wrote for my newspaper at the time appears in my own memoir:
Motorcycle Mama has reached a point in her life when she finds it important to record family history. Last week she mailed me several pages of a computer printout that represents her nascent efforts. It was fascinating reading, but maybe only because it was about my great-grandparents. It contained some colorful details, culled from Mother’s childhood memories, of visits with aunts and cousins, and of the bountiful meals served. Like other Depression era children, my mother came from a house where milk was rationed and running water was a luxury. Thus, lots of food made a big impression on her.
This first effort at recording our family’s place in the history of the country has left Mother frustrated at the gaps in her memory and in the lack of information she has to work with. She recalls that someone in the family may have my great-grandfather’s naturalization papers but can’t trace them. He and a brother, orphaned in Germany, came to the U. S. in the late 1800s. Grandpa Otto Hoffmeister homesteaded near Topeka, KS while his brother remained in Philadelphia. No one knows what happened to that brother. Now it seems important to find out.
What prompts this search to fill in the family tree? There must be a time in everyone’s life when they face the raw impermanence of things, resulting in a newfound drive to leave a record of the family legacy before it’s lost forever.
My brothers suddenly want to know where they came from. That could have something to do with some feelings of the transience of their own lives these days. Youngest brother Tommy, who is fighting rejection of Mother’s donated kidney, wrecked his car and lost his home in a tornado in the past few weeks.
Oldest brother Jim lost his home last week in a fire, while middle brother Rick is not good at taking care of his health in the wake of a massive heart attack at age 30.
I guess if we know where we come from and who we are before we leave the physical world, it might be easier to let go. The urgency to research our roots becomes even more urgent knowing that memory and mental capacity diminish with advancing ago. Plus, you never know when a tornado or fire or auto accident might stop you in your tracks and destroy the little slice of history you’ve been making.
I know the problems of a fading memory and dimming mental faculties. I felt it this morning when I took off my glasses to brush my teeth, instead of removing my dental partial.
My developing theme is now “Tell your stories before it’s too late.” To that end, I hope to begin leading a workshop on memoir writing for non-writers. One of the people who urged me to do so sent me a link this week to an article by Bruce Feiler in The New York Times. He was discussing the importance of a family narrative. He summarized his research with the following statement:
The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family’s positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.
Now that we can record our stories in digital format, in the computer cloud environment, we can rest assured that once we finish our tales, they will live on in cyberspace until the day our descendants decide it’s time to retrieve them.
July 4 is all about family reunions and storytelling
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If you are not attending a family picnic on July 4, you run the risk of being labeled un-American. For some of us, the holiday is a perfect time to attend or organize a family reunion.
A chapter of my book, “Letters from Home: Adventures with Mad Mother, Lemonade Man and the Kid,” (the book launch is set for Aug. 7) contains an entire chapter devoted to the need for all of us to record our family stories before it’s too late. The following is excerpted from two columns in the book and documents some of my experiences with summer family reunions.
A column writer much wiser and wittier than I once wrote that we’re losing our collective culture because we don’t hand down our family stories anymore. That may be true for some Americans, but not for anyone who’s ever attended a family reunion. I went to another one in Topeka Sunday and was privileged to hear some of those family sagas.
The relatives gathered around a huge hay wagon (the modern equivalent of a campfire?) that had been pulled inside a machinery shed out of the rain on the old Garrett homeplace. The wagon was spread with a plastic tarp and covered with food of every description. While the kids played in a paddle boat and fished on the farm pond, the adults stuffed their faces and looked at photo albums.
For most young adults, the extended family is never too important when we are busy raising our own kids and making our marks on the world. But something happens in mid-life. All of a sudden, family trees and roots take on new importance. The family reunion brings this together in a social setting that can leave you alternately dazed and elated.
How do you respond to the cousin who reveals that you used to walk in your sleep or to the uncle who wants you to take off your glasses so he can see your dad’s eyes? Do you eat Aunt Neva’s chocolate chip cookie bars and risk offending Aunt Gene, who baked the lemon cake? (The correct response is to take a sample of each dessert.)
How long can you look at photos of second and third cousins you didn’t know existed without yawning at least once? What do you say when three different aunts brag about the family having a helicopter pilot, a newspaper publisher, an engineer, a vet and a builder but no attorney and give you an accusing look for having split up with the latter? When an aunt makes an extremely prejudiced remark that you find highly offensive, do you ignore it, pretending it wasn’t spoken, or do you have the courage of your convictions?
At this reunion I was surprised to learn that my grandfather was in World War I, played a mean trombone and rode a fancy motorcycle. The aunts circulated a letter he’d written from a foxhole in France. It could have been a propaganda piece for the War Department, full of praise for “our boys” and contempt for those who didn’t serve their country. Back home on the farm he soon became a slave driver to his nine children, getting them up at 4 a.m. to do chores, especially when they’d sneaked out for dates the previous night.
Some of the family photos passed around at the reunion looked like they were taken straight from a Grapes of Wrath scene. Poverty and hardship were written all over the faces. An early 1950s photo caught my attention. It was one of the extended family I’d never seen. I was in it, looking up at my parents and baby brother. My mother looked like a model and my dad like a handsome gangster.
Daddy was a family favorite, partly because of his untimely death in 1954 and partly because of his perpetually cheerful outlook on life. Uncle Jerry, the youngest boy, idolized him and followed him around the farm like a faithful pup. One day they went into town together and brought back two kegs of nails for a farm project. The nails bounced off the truck and spilled all over the road. Uncle Jerry picked up every single nail, but only because my dad had strategically placed coins among the scattered nails.
Later I wondered why I didn’t repeat those family stories to my own son on the spot, or at least on our drive home. He had been too busy with kid things, like finding snake skins and goose eggs, to get to know his great aunts and uncles and to listen to the stories. I guess his day will come, like mine did. I just hope his generation learns to sit still long enough to absorb the family culture. Maybe someone will figure out a way to put family history on a Super Nintendo game.
Family reunions remind us that we are part of something bigger . . .something with history and traditions and stories that will be passed along for another generation after my son’s. They are rich social events and brief encounters with wonderful people we don’t have to live with every day. They are replete with smiles and hugs and promises to write and get together again soon–promises that we really hope to keep.
New tricks for old dogs 