It that’s what you think, think again.
An eventful weekend. Satuday I attended a regional Toastmasters conference where a champion speaker Jim Key talked about using the power of stories in speeches. To the frequent objection, “But I don’t have any interesting stories,” he offered this: “Stuff happens, pay attention.” He added, “Live an interesting life, on purpose. Have a child, get a dog.”
This objection about not having stories comes not only from Toastmasters but also from ordinary people about telling and recording their life stories. Jim meant that everyone has interesting stories, if they think about it.
The truth of this became apparent to me at a retirement party I attended the next day. My daughter’s soon-to-be mother-in-law retired from a 30-year career teaching Spanish to high school students. She also taught adult Spanish classes. This admirable woman raised three sons as a single mom, she’s an excellent photographer who exhibits at local shows, and she travels the world. Attending her party were past and present students, friends from her high school days, teacher friends, church friends, Red Hat friends, sons, daughters in law, and grandchildren. She has lots and lots of stories in her and more to come. At the party, she announced,”In my twenties I did what my mother wanted. In my thirties I did what my husband wanted. In my forties I did what I wanted–and in my fifties I stopped feeling guilty about it. In my sixties, well watch out. And in my seventies, life will be even better.”
Every person in the room had great stories, too. A woman in her eighties raised a developmentally disabled son and last year she traveled around Cape Horn. Another woman told a funny story about training her daughter’s dog–a Mastiff mix who is “165 pounds of stupid.” Another woman talked about her son in the Army who is serving in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. They communicate on Facebook.
Stuff certainly does happen. And it’s interesting.
The May issue of the Biographer’s Craft newsletter is out. I love this free newsletter, edited by James McGrath
Morris for “writers and readers of biography.” It is packed with relevant news and interesting articles. The May issue contains a story about how David O. Stewart, author of Impeached: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy, manages a huge cast of minor characters. Family histories can be full of aunts, uncles, and cousins of the first, second, and third kind. Company histories can be populated by an overwhelming number of players also, so I found this article of special interest. “You have to keep people in balance,” Stewart said. “They should get only as much air time as their significance warrants.” It may be tricky to accomplish this in a family history where every person is a relative or sometimes in a company history where the impulse is to be as inclusive as possible. How does Stewart do it? Here’s an excerpt from the newsletter article:
Stewart researches the person’s life with an eye for those things that will illuminate their behavior in the tale he is telling, “You know how they behaved,” he said, “so go back and look for parts in their lives that give some explanation as to why they acted as they did.” The research is the key. Authors gather more information about their subjects than needs to be revealed. “You look for personality traits that will be central to the story you are telling,” Stewart said. “You try to find expressions of that in their lives.”
Good advice for family historians and memoirists–”look for the personality traits that will be central to the story you are telling” and “find expressions of that in their lives.”
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CBS Sunday Morning had a segment on amnesia on May 3 and it has stuck with me for over a week. A woman found herself in an unknown city without memory of who she was or how she got there. She had lost all memory for her life before. Asked what went through her mind, her answer was, “Fear. A lot of fear.” This is an extreme situation. But it made me think that history is transgenerational memory. We know where we came from and how we got to where we are. When we know this, we aren’t so vulnerable to fear. We are braver, more confident, more assured. We have a frame of reference and a metaphorical gyroscope to keep us righted. Even more than political and social history, family history has the power to act as a gyroscope in our personal lives.
For a personal history aficionado, I am uncharacteristically anti mother’s day. On my more cynical days, I view it as a forced event for commercial purposes. My daughter always remembers the day, but I usually tell her to just skip it. And I mean it.
Of course, I like hearing from her. She sent me a greeting card this year with sweet notes from her and my soon-to-be son-in-law and enclosed a Starbucks gift card. She called me this morning, too. But it’s not like that TV commercial where mothers all over the world faint from shock when their grown children call. My daughter calls me every couple of days. And I see her every month or so, because she lives only 3 hours away by car. I am very fortunate, I know.
Instead of being Oscar the Grouchy Mom, I should welcome any occasion that reminds us to visit and listen to our families. That can be done without flower arrangements or champagne brunches or paper cards with printed sentiments. If my mother were alive today, this is what I would like to do.
When my brothers and I were children, my mother had a big book of wall paper samples. On the first of May, we would sit at the kitchen table with scissors and glue, and make little baskets from the wallpaper. In them we would put buttercups that we picked from the fields near our house. Then we’d put the baskets on the doorsteps of neighbors, ring the doorbell, and run away. If mom were alive today, I’d put a handmade May basket on her porch with herbs from my garden.
Thanks, mom, for that memory.
What is your favorite StoryCorps story?
Every day precious stories are lost. You can save them by taking a few moments to listen.
November 27, 2008, was Thanksgiving of course, but November 28 was a special day as well. And I don’t mean the shopping orgy called Black Friday. November 28 was the National Day of Listening, designated by the Library of Congress and StoryCorps. If you listened to National Public Radio at all during Thanksgiving week, you heard about StoryCorps.
StoryCorps is on a mission to honor and celebrate the lives of Americans through listening. Dave Isay, the founder and president the non-profit StoryCorps, explains the organization this way: “By recording and listening to the stories of our lives with the people we care about, we can experience our history, hopes, and humanity. Since 2003, 40,000 people have interviewed family and friends through StoryCorps. This makes StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind creating a growing portrait of who we really are as Americans.”
As luck would have it, I spent the National Day of Listening sitting at a dining room table and listening to Irving, a 92-year old African American man. tell about the day Eleanor Roosevelt likely saved his life. The army had sent him, a Virginia farm boy, to Tuskegee air base in Alabama. When Eleanor Roosevelt visited the base in 1941 and asked a group of black soldiers how they were being treated. Irving spoke right up. He told her he had blood in his urine, but every time he went on sick call, he was given an aspirin and ordered back to duty. Two hours later, he found himself discharged from the army and on his way to a government hospital where his kidney infection was diagnosed and treated–thanks to Mrs. Roosevelt.
I also listened to his wife tell about saving with her mother to buy a house in 1935. Jane and her mother both worked as domestics in Staunton, Virginia. But Jane’s mother was aging, and it was clear that they would not be able to keep their living arrangements forever. So every week Jane and her mother each put five dollars of their six-dollar wage into an envelope. In a year they had enough for down payment on a house with no indoor plumbing. With family and friends, they fixed up the house and rented out the upstairs and downstairs, to cover the mortgage until they needed to move in themselves.
Listening to these people, who had survived difficult times, reminded me of the last dinner table gathering I had with my mother and grandmother in 2000. Mom had already been diagnosed with lung cancer, and I accompanied her to Kansas to visit her mother for the last time. One evening after dinner, my mom, her sister, and grandma looked through old photo albums and told me stories. Some of these stories I had never heard before. And as a result, I saw my grandfather, my grandmother, and my mother in a new light. These stories explained so much.
I knew my grandfather as a quiet, kindly, hardworking, tee-totaling, and frugal man, who gave us comic books, never yelled and rarely smiled. But there was another side to him I found out that night. In 1940, my grandfather moved his family to Rio Tinto, Nevada, where he worked in the copper mine there. He loved the male camaraderie of working at the mine by day and playing poker by night, sometimes coming home without his pay. For Grandmother, however, the place was too rough, especially for young girls. My mother remembered being friends with a wild 10-year old boy who was frequently truant and smoked cigarettes. Grandma finally had enough of the place when a naked man came hurtling out of the miner’s bathhouse onto the road as she walked by with my mother who was then 12. As grandma tells it, she delivered an ultimatum, she was leaving with the kids and grandpa could come with her or stay behind.
As they drove away from Rio Tinto, my mother recalled her father, my grandfather, weeping. My stoic, reticent grandfather, wept.
Today, Rio Tinto is a ghost town, but it is also a living family story for me. It is said that family stories disappear in just two generations, so I wrote down what I heard that evening for my children. But I never heard my grandfather’s telling of this story.
Later when my grandmother died, I received an old journal that my grandfather kept. In it is one page where he summed up his life–in the third person. As if dates and places can tell you very much, this is all he wrote of those hard times:
“Got a job Phillips Petroleum Co under Roosevelt’s NRA at $14 a week. Stayed with them until 1937 when he moved his family to Twin Falls, Idaho, where he ran a service station for St. Clair Oil Co, until he got a job with Anaconda Copper Co as a miner in 1940. Mined until 1942.”
What I would love to ask him now if I had the chance!
I missed recording my grandpa’s stories, and the 2008 National Day of Listening has passed, but we can make our own Listening Days. Do you have a tape or digital recorder? I urge you to grab that recorder, prepare a couple of interview questions, and listen to someone tell you his or her story. You can find some guidelines for doing this on the StoryCorps website.
Or you can reserve a time in a StoryCorps recording booth near you. Check the StoryCorps website for booth locations. You will get a CD for sharing, and the story will be preserved in the Library of Congress for generations to come.
This is the perfect time–what time could be better than now?–to listen to someone tell you his or her story. As Isay of StoryCorps reminds us: Everybody’s story matters. Every life counts. And listening is an act of love.
by Nancy Heifferon
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