Story Time

We had a white Christmas this year, which has not happened in quite some time.  According to the local meteorology professor, there’s only a 10% chance of a white Christmas in any given year in our mountain town.  It was also the most snowfall we’ve had in many years, which delayed my parents’ arrival to celebrate at our house by a few hours.  One of the gifts they brought for us was a set of “books,” copied and bound pages, really.  These books are their life stories, which they began writing earlier this year after my oldest brother gave them each a journal and asked them to write their stories.

Surprisingly, my mom’s story was the shorter of the two.  She’s the talker of the two of them, so I guess I expected her story to be longer.  Many of her stories were familiar to me, in part because she is a talker but also because we spent a lot of time with her family when I was growing up.  Family legends always came up as we sat around the dinner table or a campfire.  It was interesting to read regardless of its familiarity, and I enjoyed getting a sense of her as a little girl and of my grandparents and uncles when they were younger.

My father’s book spanned many pages and chapters and much of it was new to me.  I knew a few sound bites from his youth, like he and his sister sometimes rode their horses to and from school, that he’d signed up for the Army and gone to Korea when he lost direction in college, and that his father had been murdered by ranch hands after a dispute when my father was a little boy.  I also knew that he and my mom had a whirlwind romance and that they were married less than a year after meeting one another.  What a treat, though, to learn of his extended trip to England as a boy, filled with interesting details about the school he attended, relatives they stayed with, and how frequently he had to clean his muddy shoes – a chore uncommon to an Arizona boy.

He described many life events in a considerable amount of detail, like his time as an Army clerk in Korea, or how he settled on a career as a wildlife biologist, and important projects that he worked on in that capacity.  He’s kept a short account of his days, beginning in his youth, and so was able to recall specifics that may have otherwise been forgotten. 

Mostly, though, I was struck by how deeply he loves my mom.  I suppose that I knew on some level their connection – they’ve been married nearly sixty years and that doesn’t just happen without a serious investment in one’s partner.  But it was so evident throughout his writing.  I recognize how rare and singular it is for me not only to have both of my parents living and healthy at this stage in my life, but also for them to be so generous with their stories.  Perhaps there is some desire for a degree of immortality in writing their stories like they’ve done, but why not?  They lived in a time that bridged some groundbreaking inventions, global events of great significance, not to mention life in rural Arizona in the first half of the 20^th Century.  I have friends and cousins who will never know the stories of their parents, as much as they wish they could. 

The stories were entertaining, sometimes poignant, and always interesting.  It’s often that we offspring think they knew their parents having known them our entire lives.  But we forget the lives and childhoods they had before we came along and changed everything for them.  We don’t really know our parents; we only know them as parents. 

I’ve read letters from a great-uncle I’d never met who wrote home of his work rebuilding bridges and roads in France after World War I.  There’s a story in our family history about a wedding dress that was shared by several of my female ancestors.  My husband’s grandparents recorded stories that my mother-in-law transcribed:  the grandmother’s terrible bout with scarlet fever as a child and the burning of the church where the grandfather’s father was preacher.

And so I urge you, write down some memories, funny anecdotes, adventures you took.  What was life like before smart phones, personal computers, and cable TV?  It might feel strange to think your story is worth writing, but if you add enough detail and put your heart in it, it will be appreciated.    Start with one story.  Something unusual, tragic, or funny.  And that will lead to another.  Write it down for someone.  It will be read.

The Blue Otter Pop of Happiness

It is hot, the sun intense, and the wind gusts from time to time. We are four families, camping for a weekend, something we haven’t done together since our days in college, more than two, ahem, decades prior. Now, though, there are spouses, and somehow eight children (eight!), aged thirteen to four, between us. Throughout the day, we migrate from campsite to campsite, looking for a shady space large enough to accommodate us all.

The kids flit in and out like butterflies while we adults talk, reminisce, become reacquainted, and laugh. The seven girls go on short hikes – mostly to the bathroom and back, it seems, or across the road to some granite boulders that are just challenging enough to be fun. Seth, the lone boy, rides his bike around the campground.

It’s surprising, really, how easily the conversations flow, how little some things have changed, and how certain things are still funny, even after all these years.

When Sojo, the youngest, commands our attention, the silence is reverent. She announces a joke: “How do you get a tissue to dance?”

“Put a little boogie in it!!”

Sojo is endearing, and probably because she is the youngest one present, we all focus on her. The girls want to play with her and help her meet the challenges posed by playing with kids twice or more her age. I look at Sojo and am astonished at how quickly time has passed since my daughters were her age. They’ve become so independent, sometimes in miniscule increments, sometimes by leaps. It’s easy to lose sight of how different things once were from a parenting standpoint: how my daughters seemed so independent at age four. I couldn’t fathom the level of responsibility then that they have grown to accept so readily now. I don’t really recall relinquishing most of that responsibility that they now shoulder, but somehow they have come so far.

The pack of girls runs off again, and the talk turns to work, travel, and recipes. Since I last saw Tara, Sojo’s mom, she’s lived on three different continents, working in International Schools with her husband, Dale. But somehow, those decades and oceans between us – between all of us – seem to fade to irrelevance. How is it that we might have reconnected and easily planned this outing without Facebook? Or without the Internet, for that matter? I’ve been able to see photos and read blogs of these friends and watch these families from afar, and it’s amazed me more than once that technology has the capacity allow these intimate, familial exchanges to take place, sometimes from half a world away.

I met Tara, Brian, and Jay my freshman year of college – and, let’s face it – there’s probably no other year of one’s adult life that can be so demanding, frightening, and freeing. My only responsibility was me. I was lucky to have connected with these good folk then, and grateful to have this opportunity to gather together now, even though focusing on the passage of so much time makes life appear more frenetic than it actually is.

Being outdoors allows the pace of life to slow. Most of what is extraneous is whittled away, and still we are left with much more than the basic comforts and company aplenty. And this is what I crave when I haven’t been outdoors for a while: a slower pace, easy conversation, watching the day progress with little attention to tasks besides meals, and enjoying simple pleasures with friends and family.

When the kids return again, their faces are flushed and an official Otter Pop time-out is declared. Each kid chooses a favorite color / flavor, and they dig in. Sojo’s face is the picture of bliss as she nibbles away. Sometimes happiness really can be found in something as simple as a blue Otter Pop.

And, I think, too, that this simplicity is what draws me toward the younger kids. At age four, life is pretty simple, things are quite absolute. As I grow older, I realize that less and less about life can be put into simple categories like black and white – the coincidence of what happens to our hair isn’t lost on me. Or maybe I’m just now finally able to grasp those delicate differences and nuances - because, yes, there are so many shades of grey. Would I go back if I could, to a time when I was only responsible for myself? Or to a time when my daughters were more dependent on me? Not a chance. But still, sometimes I yearn for those simple choices, like what color Otter Pop I prefer: I like the green ones.