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2002-12-05 - 8:51 p.m.

This is an entry for the Random Acts of Journaling collaborative:

It is a pity that I have not more to leave you than words. But what is a life, after all, but a story, some fiction and some truth?

J. Nozipo Maraire, Zenzele: A Letter for my Daughter

The real pity is that some people will leave only money and not words. I am afraid they will not be remembered. What is a story, besides a means to hang on to life, and not let it slip away untold?

When I was a child, I used to be amazed at how the biggest things could be over and forgotten so quickly: Christmas, the horse show, my big speaking part in the play. And now I am amazed at how fast my whole life seems to be racing by. Almost before I was used to being an adult, opportunities were already gone. Once at a family reunion, my uncle said, "I was wondering where all the old people were...don't a lot of old people always come to these things? And then I realized: We ARE the old people."

Our stories are what keep families together, and give us some sort of grounding in the overwhelming sea of human possibility. We tell them to each other, but most of all we tell them to ourselves. And begin to understand that our lives contain so much more than our personal experiences.

I am the granddaughter of a woman who would tackle any task or project, no matter how difficult or daunting. Even in old age, she was redecorating her kitchen, painting the porch, mowing the grass. We always quote her when we are in the middle of a home improvement project: "Everything always takes longer and costs more than you think it will." When she was in her eighties, she tumbled down the basement stairs and emerged without a single broken bone. She was a cheerful, sturdy sort of woman, and sometimes I think I am like that, too.

And I am the granddaughter of the man who was so neat and tidy, his children always joked that he threw away his straw hat in the winter, and his snow shovel in the summer. Sometimes I see that tendency in myself.

My other grandmother was wonderfully talented at every kind of practical art: sewing, quilting, crocheting, cooking, gardening. But she wanted to be an artist when she was young. Once she told me a story about how she was the art editor for the year book when she was in high school. She had completed a lot of the work, but then came down with an illness and missed school for a couple of weeks. While she was out sick, they let someone else take over the job. Even after fifty years, Grandma was still mad about that other girl getting her name on the volume and taking credit for her work. Hearing that story made me realize that Grandma was not always so calm and in control. She was once had big dreams and ideas. I am like her in so many ways.... in the way I approach a task, and even in my quiet nature that hides a certain proud competitiveness.

My maternal grandfather was a farmer who had worked hard all his life for very little, but he was also a thoughtful man who had gone to college, in the days before that was expected, and played the piano by ear. I don't know now if I remember him playing or if I only imagine it from the stories I've heard. But I like to think of him playing, maybe in the overalls he always wore, and bursting into one of his rare smiles. I hope it lightened his load a bit to know that he could make music with his work-roughened hands.

My father has the most beautiful handwriting of anybody I know. He used to work as a telegrapher on the railroad, and during long evenings when there were no messages, he used to practice his handwriting. Elaborate swirling capitals, and neat, angular lowercase letters filled pages and pages of paper before he developed the perfect form for every letter. He used to tell me that story as he tore off a big sheet of butcher paper and drew lines on it with a ruler. And then he would draw a capital letter at the beginning of each line and tell me to fill in the rest of the line. I wanted to be like my father and have handwriting that impressed people, so I labored to reproduce the fancy letters. And while I don't write exactly like my father, I still get compliments on my writing. I still make some of my capitals the way he taught me. I don't get along very well with my father, but I tell that story to remind myself that he did have some positive role in my life.

I am the daughter of a woman who walked dirt roads to attend a one-room rural school, studied her early lessons by kerosene lamp, and pumped water at the well. She realized her dream of finishing college, only after she also had a husband and four kids to take care of. I will never know how she did it, but that story kept me going when I was struggling to get through school and be a mother. She became a writer, published in books, magazines, anthologies and newspapers; she has told her stories to thousands of other people as she has told them to me. Her stories, and her belief in the importance of stories, have become a part of my life, too. One of the nicest things she ever did was to write a book for her children about their childhoods. It was a collection of the stories and sayings she had jotted down during our growing up years, some funny, some sad, some ironic. In those stories, she gave us back the years of our childhood we had forgotten. Some of the best gifts I ever received were words.

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