Time to capture precious memories is fleeting (10/10/05)

It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon last week. I spent a pleasant couple of hours reviewing family pictures with my mother. She told me tales about the uncles who drank and the aunts who had them thrown in jail for it. I heard about how one aunt set the house on fire while trying to thaw out some pipes and how my uncle won a trip to Disneyland by writing a jingle.

I saw pictures of my grandfather with morels that appeared to be a foot tall. That made me remember all the trips to the woods to hunt mushrooms with him. It always felt like such an honor to be asked to go on these expeditions even though I couldn’t find a mushroom if my life depended on it. It didn’t help that anything farther away than a couple inches in front of my face was a blur when I was little. Things aren’t that much better now.

Then we decided to see if we could find the town where my grandfather was born. We both had a general idea of where it was but Mom thought it was on the south side of the nearest highway and I thought it was north. For once in my life I was right.

It was just an ordinary looking little village. We never did find the downtown district. I asked her if anything looked familiar but as she wasn’t even sure she had ever been there before the answer was no. At the far edge of town we parked at the feed mill and I got out to take a picture. I wanted proof that I had been there.

I had the scene composed perfectly with a cornfield behind the “Welcome to New Paris” sign before I realized that there was no film in the camera. I walked back to the car and my mother laughed at me. By the time I had put film in the camera and was ready to snap the shutter the motorcycle parade started. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands. OK, maybe not that many, but it sure seemed like it. Most of them waved and beeped. I didn’t realize that motorcycles had such wimpy-sounding horns. Every time I thought we were near the end, here would come another bunch.

My mother accused me of flirting. I pointed out that quite a few of the riders were female. She said she didn’t see those. I told her they were really waving at her but she didn’t believe me. I finally got the picture I wanted and we moseyed on back home.

It seems like a boring way to spend a Sunday, but it wasn’t. I am well aware that memories are fading. I feel the need to gather all the history that I can from one who lived it.

It’s funny. History was one of my worst subjects in school. The worst was gym, but history was a close second. All those dates, wars and generals were as dry and dull as dust. Perhaps if our classes had concentrated more on the people who lived through the events I wouldn’t have found it so mind-numbing.

I think it’s much more interesting to hear that someone I knew had to go to bed hungry during the Depression than to have to memorize when it started and how long it lasted. Stray books of ration stamps and the stories that go with them are more real than battles in far-away places. Wars and the monumental tragedies that go hand-in-hand with them are too big to comprehend. Tell me about the people. Those are the stories I want to hear.

I came home with mottled sepia pictures and tales of dead folks. Some part of me would have preferred to have been hiking through the woods on such a beautiful fall day. But time with my mother is precious and fleeting.

She will probably outlive all of us but I can’t take that chance. I am compelled to capture her memories on paper so they don’t disappear like dandelion seeds on a breezy day. And if I get beeped at by a motorcycle parade so much the better.[[In-content Ad]]