The last day of 2009. Wow!
The late, great jazz musician Eubie Blake summed up my position perfectly when he said "If I'd known I was gonna live this long, I'd have taken better care of myself." Like all of us, I had my period of reflection today about what I've done with this year, and how that stacked up against what I'd PLANNED to do with it.
As I was doing all that reflectation (that's a word in the South!), something hit me like a bolt out of the blue, and I wanted to get it on paper (well, on-screen at least) before it evaporated into the same realm as whatever it was that I was thinking of at 2:15 PM last Thursday.
If you've read any of my earlier pieces, you're aware that I delight in remembering things. It probably won't come as a great surprise, then, for you to learn that I am a great history fan. As an outgrowth of that, I've been in an on-again/off-again, love-hate relationship with genealogy for the past 7 years or so. It's love-hate because, on the love side, it's very exciting to tap into a rich new deposit of information on the people that brought you into the world. On the hate side, those rich deposits can be very few and far between.
I was blessed enough to really strike a big one on a cold night a couple of years back. We're talking about birth dates back to the year 1234. Having been stuck at dates of around 1720 for over a year, this was a big deal, and I stayed up until 3:30 AM that morning, happily assembling details between yawns.
Using my genealogy software, I was typing in the information on George Steed, my maternal grandfather's brother. Uncle George has long since passed on, but if you could meet him, I could guarantee you two things:
1. The first person you'd think of when you met him would be Jed Clampett, and
2. Uncle George would be just fine with that.
Right down to his scraggly whiskers, this was a man who made no effort to be anyone or anything other than himself. I never saw him in anything other than a pair of Liberty bib overalls. I also never saw him in anything other than a good mood, offering a smile, a soft kind word, and a warm welcome to everyone he came in contact with.
That's the picture I was seeing in my mind as I was entering his information, but I realized before long that I was also remembering the little sweet-apple tree in his yard, the way-cool old swing by the creek behind his house, and the old wood-stove that he cooked on and heated his little house with.
He lived alone, at the dead end of a dirt road in rural (and I do mean RURAL) Roane County, East Tennessee. In no time at all, these memories played out in sequence in my mind's eye: riding down that dusty old rough road, getting to Uncle George's little place, stockpiling a bunch of those sweet apples, and heading for that swing where I'd savor the woods, the apples, and the smell of hickory smoke drifting out from the stove to permeate the woods and the crisp autumn air.
I'm obviously still under the spell of that memory, because I still haven't gotten to the "bolt".
It's simply this, (and it really is so simple that lots of folks miss it): nobody in your family (or anywhere else) is just a name, a set of dates, or a location. They all have a story, and that's the tangible part of their memory. It's not the collecting of a bunch of dates to show what a skilled statistician you are. Remembering who they were, as real people dealing with the full array of things life can bring to a person, should be the bedrock reason we remember them at all. And that's the standard I think we should use when we do our New Year's self-evaluation. What are WE going to be remembered for this year?
My genealogy software informs me that, as of this morning, I have 487 names plugged in, and the same things that made remembering Uncle George such a worthwhile exercise are also true of the other 486 names. They all have a story. They all, for better or worse, have left a legacy.
There is an old Southern gospel song called "The Dash". The title refers to the dash that separates the birth and death dates on a gravestone. Even though the actual dates on the stone are the specific information, what happens "during the dash", as we live out our lives, is what we're going to be leaving with the world, and it's what we'll be remembered for.
So that's where I stand on this cold morning. The sun's bright outside, but as my good friend and Tennessee native Doug Presley (who now lives over in Indiana) says, "it's lying its butt off". It's still cold. The momentum from Christmas is still winding down, and shoppers are still packing the stores looking for bargains and exchanging gifts.
As corny as it may sound (did you hear that? I was worried about corn in Illinois!), I know I will consider it an entirely different kind of gift to have learned what a great, ongoing family story I'm part of, and how I fit into it. Whether you ever tackle genealogy or not, I hope you get to experience the joy of that in your own way.
As for myself, well, you can tell by my stories that I'm working on a very interesting "dash" to leave behind.
How's yours going?
No comments:
Post a Comment