document my family history

“The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise … but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.”

-Doris Lessing. From her speech accepting the Nobel Prize in 2007.

Somehow, in a conversation tonight, I remembered. Simple. I just remembered. I am so full of memories, some are quite horrible and others still make me cry with happiness. Sometimes I feel like I am going to burst or that I can’t take it anymore, they are too heavy. Sometimes I am pained because so much has been lost. I am the keeper. I can take videotape. I can record but in the end it is my memories that will inform the stories I will tell my son as they inform the stories I tell now.

I have a contentious relationship with my family as often as I have a beautiful one with them. So it goes. I am documenting all of it. In my head and in my heart. These memories, these internal tattoos. Not just the physicality of sitting with my son and watching a movie, watching his face react but the emotion of it. I am here. I am now. I am living this life.

Tonight, with someone, I told stories and I was told stories. She remembered and I remembered and when it was time for her to go I felt the pang of sadness that the conversation was done. But I was so grateful for it. I don’t think I got to say thank you for that.

The conversation keeps going, doesn’t it?

It’s very much like using the phrase, “when I grow up.” That assumes that there is a point at which you will be grown up, as if the growing will, at some point, stop.

These are my thoughts before the year ends and the new one begins. If there needs to be such weight…as in the rebirth, the beginning of a new year then let it be with memory and with action. what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.

I’ve realized there are certain things I am never going to be able to document. There are moments and memories that now inhabit me and are my immediate history now. It’s funny how you can experience something so vividly, how it can mean the world to you but you mention it to the friend, the lover or the family member you experienced it with and they don’t quite remember.

I remembered this line from a novel I recently read

“We relive stories and see ourselves only as the watcher, the listener, the drummer in the background keeping cadence.”

So, when I think of my mom, aside from all the insanity that goes along with battling your mother (and never winning) I will remember being fourteen waiting at Tinley Park High School in the hallway for my sister to finish her clarinet lesson. My mom asked me what I was reading and I told her it was an article on the Sex Pistols and I explained why they meant so much to me. And, completely sincerely, she said, “That’s nice.” We never connected on anything again, nor would we have anything to connect on even now but that moment filled me with enough strength to make it for the rest of the year and hold onto the new found love of music and meaning (and later politics) that it seemed no one else around me thought about (or so I thought).

Or sitting in the hospital with my father and shaving him. Just simply shaving him and remembering an old TV movie in the eighties where I saw that same image and it made me cry. Or his stories about visiting his grandparents in a town in India called Vasad and his grandfather telling him stories of how ghosts of train wrecks would walk the rail lines at night and how he was 8 years old having snuck out at night terrified jumping at every sound at the depot.

This is what happens in the middle of a Friday when for no particular reason at all, you suddenly look at your father’s face and are aware that you are present in time, slowly moving.

If that makes any sense at all.

My father for awhile would record his history on an old Grundig voice recorder then later on a tape recorder but it became sporadic. I want to videotape him talking so I can show it my son someday. I want to videotape my mom too but I’m not quite sure how receptive she would be. After the initial stiffness (that goes with being recorded) I’m hoping it will ease into a narrative. A narrative that spans India, Tanzania, and various stops onto the United States.

When I first got out of college I began a project where I interviewed people with a set list of questions and then opened up the door for them to interview me back. I wanted to teach myself how to listen and I wanted to document the creation of dialogue.

I don’t know if it’s because I have gotten older or because I have grown (there is a difference between the two) but I have become more and more possessive of memory. I stated in another post that I spent the first part of my life trying to forget, such a young and angry thing to do but a lot happened in my childhood/youth that I wanted to. Now I am spending this next part of life, however long that may be, trying to remember and in some ways become accountable to the child I was who is more and more looking at me rather reproachfully.

When I left teaching, the site director gave me a small stone that simply said, Remember. I am trying.