When I was in 6th grade I won Honorable Mention or something like that in the Social Studies Fair with a poster I made called City of the Future. Basically, I envisioned that everyone would live in apartments on top of shopping malls. Everything would be in the mall that we needed -- doctor's offices, grocery stores, etc. We wouldn't need cars. We could roller skate down the hall to school.
For a 6th grader who hated doing yard work it seemed like the perfect Utopia.
Ironically, here I am forty-four years later, and I live in a house where I can use a computer to order gifts and groceries, and I really don't need to go anywhere. I do, of course, still go to the grocery store, the gas station, the doctor, the beauty salon, friends' homes, etc.
I was watching the movie Passengers, and thinking about its' vision of the future, thirty or more years from now. The main characters record their story, of life as the lone surviving passengers. (I won't say more, in case you haven't seen the movie. Excellent movie, BTW.)
My grandchildren and their descendants will not have to wonder what Memaw Dee was like. All they have to do is read my blog, or my book about my daughter's adoption, or my poetry or short stories. I may write another memoir one of these days, too. I like to document my life and share it.
Why? Where does this impulse come from?
I don't know, but I have a theory.
All my life, I have heard my parents talk about my father's parents, who died before I was born.
I can look in Grandaddy's face and see Dad's face. I can look in the mirror and see Cordelia's high forehead -- and truthfully, I can see shadows of all my grandparents' faces there.
Mom always says I have Cordelia's giggle.
I also have Grandaddy's impatience -- I am impatient and impulsive. He once got mad and shot a chicken that wouldn't get off his car. I've never shot a chicken but I could see myself doing that, if I was running late for work.
I wish I had more. I wish I had a letter one of them wrote, or a diary. I would love to hear their words, talking about their lives, sharing their ideas and philosophies with me. I would love to hear Grandaddy talk about what it was like to fight Pancho Villa in 1916. I would like to hear about his time as a professional gambler in South Georgia [a brief period, thankfully]. I would love to hear Grandmother Cordelia tell me what my dad was like as a little boy. I'd like to hear her talk about how it felt to have to go back to teaching school in World War II because there was a teacher shortage, and she found herself teaching her own son [my dad] one year. I so wish that I could read their words and imagine their voices talking to me, reaching across the years.
I have one letter that my grandfather [Bob Hasty, Mom's father] wrote, in the late 1950's, to her. When I read it, I hear his voice.
That's the power of the written word.
Every blog I write, I give out little fragments of my heart, or I try to, at least. However, you cannot explain an entire life in a blog, or even a multi-volume autobiography, but you can offer glimpses.
What I long to do is read the words of some of my ancestors, to hear their ideas, their opinions, their thoughts. Sadly, there are no letters or diaries of my great-grandparents or further back.
I had a membership to Ancestry.com for a while but I canceled it. It's too frustrating. I could spend hours running names through their database and only find stuff like census data, possibly land records, deeds, the occasional newspaper mention. Find a grave is mostly just photos of graves. Occasionally you get more, but it's rare. Even photos are rare.
That's my great-great grandmother, Charlotte Wood Butler. Her son, Robert Edward Butler, I know a bit about, because my mom and my uncles remembered him. I know nothing about her, except she was well-off financially and lived in North Georgia, or possibly South Carolina.
I have a photo (not scanned in) of my father's grandmother, Annie Lou Lewis Thompson, made when she was a tiny, wizened old lady in the bed. They called her "Little Granny." She was widowed young, and my grandfather had to quit school and go to work to support her and his younger siblings. I wish I could sit down and chat with her, ask her about her life. I'm sure it was very hard.
I'd like to know, for instance, why she named one of her sons "Chillie" and one of her daughters "Nannie."
I have many friends who now have grandchildren. Most of us post on Facebook, write emails, send texts. What will our descendants know about us, though? We live in an age when it's so easy to take photos, to communicate in words, or Skype calls or Facetime calls. We walk around with tiny computers in our pockets. I feel strongly we should leave memoirs and tell our stories, all of us, so future generations will understand us. Doesn't matter if we are rich or famous, or very ordinary. What matter is, we were HERE. We made their parents, or grandparents, etc.
We should tell our stories. We owe it to them.
My ancestors lived in an age when paper was not easy to find, and pens and ink were not easy to get, either. Very few pieces of paper survive more than a few decades. It was very hard for them to leave records for us.
Now, it's very easy.
We need to tell our stories, in our own words, and leave words and pictures, so they can learn, so they can know where they came from, and how we felt, and what we believed in.
In the end, it's the most important thing we can do, I think. Tell our stories.
