Write Stories To Me, Grandpa! | Page 7

the natural process, carry the torches into the future. This responsibility to family and community is in the substance of existence.
LIVING HISTORY
For many of us, our lives are keyed to significant events, transitions, locales, or something that has importance to ourselves or to our families. For me, the important events and episodes happened to be on a time-line by location: the places where my family resided over the years. I spent the first twenty-five years of my life in the city where I was born and raised. Afterward, a few years in a distant city, then on to another and still another, each invariably distant and different than before.
After I retired, I took the time to make notes on as many important events that I could recall, and keyed each to a geographic location. I gave each episode a title or sketched a brief outline that would stimulate my memory to the place and help me to talk about it. My list began with city A: my preschool and school years (with several sub-headings because those times had been chaotic); the Great Depression, the first job, etc. City B: why I was there; the job; etc. I continued on to the next and the next.
When I finished my initial list of 'cities' or 'countries' and numbered them I found that I had more than one hundred events, episodes or time periods. I arranged them so that one followed the other as they had occurred or were otherwise linked. That became my outline.
I took the list along when I visited my grandchildren (my daughter had briefed the family beforehand about Grandpa's list.) Evenings, relaxed at the table after dinner, Grandson or Granddaughter would call out, for example, 'Grandpa! Number 67!' I made a big deal out of hauling the list from my back pocket, carefully unfolding it, locating the number and reading the title aloud. Then, on to chin-rubbing, head scratching, ceiling staring, and after enough 'C'mon, grandpa! Get with it!' from all directions I went into my act, narrating in words, tone, gestures, and body language the events of oft-told 'Number 67', or whatever number they had chosen.
They would listen, spellbound and cut in with comments and questions. To them, it was their family history and often, drama, and they really want to know. Invariably, the story was followed with reminiscences by their Mom and Dad who added variations, details, interpretations from their memories, and spin off comparable events in their lives, often long into the wee hours.
Autobiography became living history-the occasion of the telling is now an event not to be forgotten-and the finest kind of intergenerational communication.
FOLK TALES
An old, old man lived in the home of his son. The son had a wife and a young son of his own. At meal times the old man sat at the kitchen table. His eyes were dim and he barely saw; his ears were dull and he barely heard, and his hands trembled. He had difficulty holding his spoon as he tried to feed himself broth from a bowl. Now and then a few drops fell from his spoon on to the tablecloth, or the bowl tipped too far, spilling.
His son and his son's wife were disgusted at the sight of him. Finally, one day, after the old man's trembling hand caused the bowl to fall to the floor and break, they gave him an old wooden bowl, and made him sit with it out of sight behind the stove. At mealtimes, they put food into the wooden bowl and left the old man alone to manage as best he could.
One evening, after dinner, they were all in the sitting room. The old man's son noticed that his own young son had gathered few pieces of wood and stored them in a corner among his playthings.
'What have you there?' The youngster's father pointed to the wood.
The child looked up. 'I am making wooden bowls,' he answered quietly, 'for you and for Mommy to eat out of when I am grown, and you are both very old.'
I received a letter from a woman of Japanese ancestry who read the story. She wrote that her father, who had passed along to his children much of the lore and tales of old Japan, had told her another version:
In many villages of old Japan, the townsfolk suffered deeply and, often, the extremes of hunger and cold. It was vital to the survival of the able- bodied that those who were in their final hours of life be taken to the nearby foothills and left there to die. This sorrowful task belonged to the senior son.
So it was, indeed, that a dutiful senior son, at the appropriate time imposed by illness and tradition, wrapped his dying mother in the family blanket reserved for such sad