Kiddo and I spent Saturday afternoon helping my parents clean out an old storage area that they'd rented after my grandmother came to live with them in 1992 or so. The stuff in there was coated with an inch of dirt and grime and it was dirty business to get all we wanted to keep sorted out and the remnants thrown away.
My grandmother died in 2002 at the age of 101. I'd been tasked by my parents (who lived in another city) to stop by and look in on her daily after my grandfather's death in 1989. I was 22 then and the last thing in the world I'd wanted to do was take care of a 90 year old lady I had absolutely nothing in common with. I figured (in the selfish way of youth) that I'd get around that by stopping by for breakfast. That way I could claim to have done my duty but be able to beg off spending too much time there -- after all, I was busy! I had a life!
So I went for those reluctant breakfasts. We didn't have much to speak about in the beginning so as she was making me fried eggs and coffee and oatmeal, I cast about for topics and happened to see an old suitcase full of pictures in the closet. She pulled it out and laid out those pictures and told me stories about the people in them. Those breakfasts -- and her storytelling -- engendered in me a love for genealogy and stirred up my love of history and nostalgia into a fomenting soup.
And you know, it wasn't too long before breakfast with my grandmother was no longer that reluctant duty. There were more pictures and more people each time I went. There were stories of real lives and loves and deaths, of first baseball games she saw and her first sighting of an airplanes, her first World Fair trip and her Depression-era hardships, and of her trip in a Model T halfway across the country in the mid 1920s. The first time she heard a radio, the first time she saw a TV.
But there was more to it than that. Much more. I was finally able to grow up enough to look past her wrinkled face and scarred nose (from a bout with skin cancer in the 50s) and see within, to the immortal 25-yr old that lived in her head. She always said that was about how old she felt. She had a spirit and a wisdom and a kindness that up until then I'd never been able to see.
I look back now and I still feel tears well in my eyes. I am so very thankful my parents forced that duty upon me. If they hadn't my grandmother would have died and I would never have known what an amazing woman she was, nor would I have had the pleasure of her presence in my life. I am equally lucky that she lived as long as she did and I had her until 2002. She was the repository for a lot of the old keepsakes in my family. Most of those she gave to me before her death.
In the storage shed I found a monkey my grandmother made me when I was born. This little handmade monkey, all brown and white and red of lip and butt, freaked my kiddo out something fierce. She wanted me to cover it up or hide it when she went to bed because it was staring at her. Hah!
We also found more old letters and pictures, including an old tintype of my 4th great grandfather that's in such good shape it seems he's about to jump clean out of the image; it's that crystal clear. Finds like this stir my soul.
Funny thing is, up until now my kiddo has always made disparaging remarks about "Mom's Dead People." When she was a toddler I took her to cemeteries I needed to do research at, and I have pictures of her leaping off of tombstones. She's never been the slightest bit interested. That's why her words surprised me so much when she was looking at all the old letters heaped in a pile around her.
"Mom," she asked, holding up a letter written in 1880, "What will people a hundred years from now know about us? We don't write these anymore. Our emails just....disappear. How will they know who we are?"
I just looked at her with a bit of amazement. I can't honestly say I'd thought about that all that much. So I told her so.
She sighed. "It's a shame. All we'll ever be is statistics, someone will think that 85% of us believed a certain way. And it's not true."
She's right. Are we of the Information Age doomed to be remembered as nothing more than a representation of statistical information culled from data sets? Our blogs are here but then they're gone. We text and delete without concern. We IM and close the session and walk away. We can't pass all those down, can we? We don't write letters on real paper, with real pens, to real people anymore, do we? We've seen so many benefits to our lightning fast communications, but maybe the downside is that we will lose the ability to give the sort of gift to our descendants that my grandmother gave me when she opened up the letters and the pictures and the tangible items of my own past. We are all individuals after all. We're not numbers on a survey.
((Song: "Two Different Roads" by Michael Nesmith. Lyrics here:
http://www.morethanweimagine.com/andhits/two_different_roads.html))
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