record my grandparents' stories.

I have started to write something in my blog about my Dad’s Dad. It will become a bit of a series of stories of things I remember about him, things he has told me about his life and other things. The first entry I made today was the fact that he can recite Wordsworth’s Daffodils poem off by heart. More than 50 years after he first had to learn it.
I can’t recite a single poem all the way through.

I actually didn’t do my grandparents, but I did my father who is as old as many of my peers grandparents. He passed away a little over a year ago at the ripe age of 86.

My father had Alzheimer’s. Knowing then that my children would never know their ‘Poppy’ as he was when he was in his prime saddened me. So I did what I could.

I bought a tape recorder with a microphone, clipped it on to his lapel and just talked. Being able to hear what it was like in Chicago during the depression where they (my grandparents and father) owned a grocery, to his young years in Kansas, and summers with family in Kentucky, the dimestore he owned in Missouri, and then working for the St. Louis County DOT as a dispatcher.

I highly encourage everyone to do this. My father is gone, but I have some of him with me always.

I want to record my grandparents, and get a “living history” from them, in their own voices. They are both approaching 90 years old.

To record my granddad’s voice and then I’m going to save up and buy a minidisc or the next new-fangled thing so I can fly up to Chicago and record Grama Great’s 92 years of stories.