Sunday Afternoon Rocking
Ears to Hear (from the "Sunday Afternoon Rocking" series)
Yesterday my daughter and I drove miles within a fifteen-
mile radius, over
and over again, up one road and down the other, back
again. Yesterday my
daughter, who never seemed interested before, was a
visitor to her own
hometown. We did not plan the excursion. I simply
passed a place we had
passed every day of her life and repeated a story from
my youth that she
had heard before. Overnight she realized she had not
stopped to look at
the places she had seen every day for all of her life.
Overnight she
realized she had not heard me when I had told the same
stories I told again
yesterday. Suddenly she could not get enough. Up and
down and all around
we drove, she pumping me for more information about the
places and people I
had known. She eagerly asked "how this place used to
be", what that land
once was, who had owned it, who the people were who had
owned that
business, what had happened to "these people". I told
the same stories,
and her enthusiasm fed my own. I reached deeper,
pulling out memories and
tidbits I had not thought about in years. She marveled
at the tales that
she could remember me telling, but suddenly were taking
on a "new life" for
her. And I marveled…that my now adult daughter, come to
visit, now had
caught the spark, now could hear, now would eagerly
question. At last…what
I have waited so long for has begun. And now I can be
assured, our oral
history will continue…
There is a good deal to be said for oral history. It
may not take the
place of an aged bonafide document, but it is infinitely
more
interesting. The colorful slants on a situation or
thing assumed by the
teller paint a picture of the attitude of a time better
than any cold print
can. The memories passed on are filtered, teller after
teller, until only
the main nugget of interest remains. Embroidered they
may be, and such
embroidery has misled many a descendent, but somewhere
in even the telling
of them lies a fact, or the story would not be worthy of
its passage
through the conversations of the years.
Once a little girl tugged at a grandmother's sleeve, and
good-humoredly the
older lady told tales of an Irish lad on a ship who
grew up to become a
Confederate soldier. Another day of begging for a story
brought a "haint
tale" of a many greats grandfather who worked an iron
furnace and
reappeared to ask a long ago peer to go to a "hiding
place", as his family
left behind would now need that money. Still another
story was told of a
native American family who wandered until they found
a "safe place" nestled
in the heart of the Tennessee hills, where they
superficially put aside
their heritage, but remembered it in the telling to
their own. On and on
the stories went, unwinding like a ball of colorful yarn
to spill into the
lap of the little girl who would one day set out to see
for herself which
of those stories were embroidered, and which held an
element of truth. Her
dream would be to take all of that colorful yarn and
knit it together into
a grand adventure of a coverlet to wrap securely around
a family's sense of
self. I have yet to "prove" all of those stories, but
all, I have found,
contained that nugget "of truth". And more than a few
of the stories have
pointed me in the direction of the aged bonafide
document called "proof".
The documents we want…they prove our names and dates
upon the paper. But
the oral history is in some way, infinitely more
precious. How many times,
I have wondered, were the stories my grandparents told
me, told
before? How many ears have heard them, and how many
heard them with ears
that were awake? Why were the stories so important that
they were never
lost with the multitudinous events of the past? Why,
because they were
important, of course! Because the day of inception was
one in a family
that was to be remembered. Because the event was
considered at the time to
be a momentous one in a history. Because the teller
wanted those to come to
know, and because those who came heard, and thought
those who came still
later should know. And so the stories came to me. And
one day my daughter
had ears to hear. Another day, perhaps, she will pull
out those stories,
she will dig deep in her memory, she will remember what
seemed most
momentous to her in the telling, and she will have a
child with ears to
hear…I hope.
Just a thought,
jan
Copyright ©2001JanPhilpot
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Thanks, jan)
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