I can’t bear to think about the election. Also, I can’t bear not to. On average, I get twenty emails and two texts a day about it, asking for money or asking me to volunteer. (I have no idea how many phone calls I get a day because I just don’t answer.) I force myself to stay away from the news, then fall into it obsessively. I read the actual news, then analysis of the news, then opinion pieces. Then I watch snippets of late-night-show monologues from the night before. In short, I’m like just about everyone else this week.
It’s worth trying to think about something else for a few minutes–for the distraction, if nothing else. So I’m going to think aloud here about getting our lives down in written form. Most of us aren’t interested in writing substantial memoirs. On the other hand, we wish our parents and grandparents had jotted down names and notes for us. (Or at least labeled their photographs.) So what are we to do?
Well, here’s one possibility. Last Christmas, my stepdaughter gave StoryWorth subscriptions to my husband and me. She’d just had a baby and wanted the family stories in some printed form to hand down to him.
Here’s how StoryWorth works: every week, Michael and I are each sent a question to answer. We write short replies and send them in. At the end of the year, our replies will be printed and bound into books—one for each of us—with photos if we want them included. We’ve both found the project irritating at moments because—even though we keep our weekly answers brief and off the cuff—it does consume a fair amount of time. We’ve also found it worthwhile. Each week, we each tell one small story or reflect on one small topic. Yet by the time the New Year rolls around, each of us will have created for our kids and grandkids a mosaic composed of these tiny fragments of memoir.
I’ve written about forty of these mini-essays so far, on a wide range of topics: how I spend a lazy day, what I remember about my grandparents, magical moments in my life, my biggest adventure, my best boss, my thirtieth birthday, advice for my great-grandchildren, whom I went to prom with. And so forth. Important stuff, trivial stuff, long-ago adventures, and present-day pleasures. Nothing too dark, of course (though I did get a question about my most difficult moment in a relationship and how I got through it). You can see it would be fun.
As an example, here’s what I wrote on a question about about what I learned from my parents. (That’s a photo of them at the top of the post.)
From my parents, I learned
*ambition. My mom and dad were both very poor as children and decided they wanted more spacious, gracious lives. They became Episcopalians, my dad chose the management side of railroad work, and my mom started taking college classes. They were determined to be upwardly mobile. Partly because of the post-WWII economic surge, they succeeded. And they passed on to my brother and me an equally strong determination not to let our lives be too limited by lack of money.
*discipline and work. Like many in their generation, my parents expected to work for their money. When my brother and I were in school, they conveyed the clear message that school and homework were our work. We watched my mom take college classes, with the dining room set up as her workspace. My dad read the paper, but the rest of us spent most evenings doing our homework.
*a love of education. It wasn’t just money—or even primarily money—my parents were after. It was a life of culture and learning, of interest in the wider world, of having friends who were doing interesting things and going interesting places. My brother and I never imagined a life without college.
*a corresponding horror of anything trashy or tacky. This is the not-so-pretty side of ambition to rise. I wasn’t allowed to pierce my ears until I was living on my own, because “only trailer-trash did that.” (My mom used to wear screw-on earrings to parties. After an hour, she would circulate around the room, telling everyone to admire her earrings because they were about to come off.) I still have a deeply middle-class horror of messy yards, cars set up on cement blocks, trailer parks, and unweeded gardens. Also, of vulgarity, whether from comedians or our current President.
*gestures of affection. My parents clearly found each other fun and sexy. They flirted with each other over drinks after work and danced with each other at parties. My dad patted my mom’s butt when he passed her in the kitchen. I’m not generally super-huggy, but Michael and I enjoy the snuggling side of marriage.
*the importance of friends. Not only did my parents have great friends (and enjoy them), but they encouraged me to have them. They opened the house to my geeky/nerdy set of friends all through high school. (On one memorable occasion, they hosted a casino party for a huge group, with my dad as croupier for the roulette wheel. We won or lost Monopoly money.) For my church-group friends, they made dozens of pancakes and poured gallons of orange juice on Sundays after church.
In other words, I was lucky in my parents. They were by no means perfect people, but they were generous, lively, responsible parents. They gave my brother and me a stable home, strong middle-class values, and permission to have fun.
Naturally there are negative things I learned from my parents, too (like avoiding the topic of money, not boasting or expecting praise, waiting for any judgement of mine to be confirmed or corrected), plus useful things I didn’t learn from them (like self-confidence, spontaneity, and outdoorsy-ness). I didn’t write about those things. So yes, of course my reflections for StoryWorth are only part of a more complex truth. On the other hand, I loved thinking about the strengths of my parents. Writing this down left me feeling misty-eyed and grateful for them.
What about you? What lessons did you learn from your parents?
I love the photo of your parents: they look also alive and celebratory. Thanks for including.
Reflecting on what you wrote, I owe my love of reading to my mother. At the moment I have a downstairs book called “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers” and an upstairs book, “The Stone Angel” by Margaret Laurence. The first is a meta-biography written by a 2009 graduate of Middlebury College, on the short list for this year’s National Book Review. The second is a novel which Carol Shields cited over and over as her major influence. When my mother died, she was halfway through a then new biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, among the many reasons she wished she did not have to say good bye.
Now I (we) know what to ask for for Christmas. Love that picture too. Mom looks a lot like her daughter. It’s so nice to be prompted to do something that I’ve been meaning to do for years. A good new method, and a great way to think about something other than politics.
You’re one of the people that will truly enjoy StoryWorth, I think–those bite-sized chunks of memory and reflection….
I remember those two people so well. Your father’s eyes are so bright in that photo!
Your Mother told me several times in the the last years of her life that she intentionally bought those pecans she kept out in the den because she knew I would eat them. I think she wanted me to know (35 years later) that they were a gift meant for me. Thanks for sharing her. She was one of my best friends.
And you were one of hers! She enjoyed kicking around with you.
I knew the moment I opened this week’s entry that the folks in the photo must be your parents. Your resemblance to your mother is striking–she was as pretty you are! Since my mother died two weeks ago, I’ve spent a lot of time in those weeks thinking about how very fortunate I was to have her and how hard she worked to give my brothers and me a stable family life. I am so grateful to have been with her and singing “Molly Malone” when she drew her last breath. I’m with Randy: I think I now know what to ask for for Christmas this year. And Maddy has given me two great titles to add to the list I am counting on to help see me through what promises to be a winter made difficult by the pandemic and I fear even worse by the aftermath of the election regardless of the legal results. Please keep writing! I look forward to every entry.
I was thinking of you at your mom’s bedside as I wrote the last paragraph summing up how I feel about my parents. And yes, my parents could look good — they were really something when they were young, kind of Spenser Tracy/Katharine Hepburn-ish….