We were chatting one day as we built a fence line, me and the kid. He had been working with me every Saturday for close to five years and was closing in on his 20th birthday. I knew the broad outlines of his life and relations. So what he told me came as a surprise, when I asked after a grandmother who lived next door to his family. His response was something I’ve pondered many times in the intervening years.
He had never had a significant conversation with his grandmother: did not know how old she was, where she was born, who her people were. He had never stopped by just to sit with her — talk, ask, listen. These two, in and out of one another’s house and life for 20 years, but not once had either exercised the minimum of curiosity called for to learn about the other. Atoms floating together in the cosmos, yet neither magnetized by the familial connection.
That I grew up amidst spoken volumes of family stories is often referenced in these pages. It’s an experience that is not at all unusual. My partner comes from a similar background, as do most of my peers of a similar age. We all were surrounded by memory keepers. But I wonder, is that a tradition that is now ending?
My aunt, who will soon be 99, is by inclination, ability, and longevity a memory keeper for my family. A woman who still recalls the names and gifts of each person who gave her a wedding present in 1945 is someone to be respected. As important as the capacity to recall such ephemera of one’s life are the ability and willingness to be a storyteller, to be the person who weaves the details of personal experience into a meaningful narrative that sheds light on class, history, family, and place.
The role of memory keeper is as old as our race, but its status in these times is precarious. Our ongoing political project of individual liberty, supported by our technological self-absorption, has freed us from the connections of those who came before. The courtesies of community are now left to be redefined by an ever more ambitious globalism. The struggle of the modern has become one of repudiation of place and a need for constant reinvention. The result is that we no longer belong. We are left floating unmoored, selecting a story to tell that has been personalized for us by others — complete with a “who” we have decided to be in this moment, cut off from embarrassments of birth, childhood, parentage, scrubbed clean of politically incorrect markers.
We have become too prideful of who we are as individuals, too ignorant in self-interest to want to understand, let alone embrace, the intricate web that defines us. In truth, we see no web. We pretend a text message is the same as a lunch with a friend. We believe a wave of the hand sufficient substitute for a face-to-face with a grandmother or grandfather, aunt or uncle, niece or nephew.
Even dinners and evenings sitting on a screened porch now leave no place for the elders to share their stories: The great floods. The first and second world wars. How my grandfather lost his business, farm, and fortune to the Depression, yet still managed to support his family by taking work with the New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps. Without those slow evenings, I would have missed out on playing checkers with that same grandfather. Missed out on learning how to lose the game and still win. Because, while he hooted with laughter and hollered “Run piggy, run!” as he chased my last remaining piece around the board, he also told me stories of family — our heroes and our rascals; told me of his life; taught me who I was. Memory keeping needs time, space, pacing, and checkers even, to flourish. Most important, it needs love.
That we live in a segregated society, walled off from people of a different age and from our own past, is not new. But now, as our memory keeper nears the end of life, few care to know her stories, or their own. A memory keeper needs a listener. And it needs a caretaker, someone willing to take on the responsibility, accept the burden, to tell who we were and still are. That role has become obsolete. It has been handed off to the faceless and unknowable, entrusted to server farms and social media, and we are left with the carefully curated life of the moment.
Now our living, breathing memory keeper is no more. She is rebranded instead as a scrapbooking product sold at Walmart, the oral traditions of the millennia having been reduced to a cheap item bought, stored on a remote shelf, and eventually discarded. That is who we are now, what we have accepted. Yet at what price?
………………………………………………………………
Reading this weekend: Duck Season (McAninch) and more Berry from the Modern Library collection of fiction.
A place is radiant with memories worth keeping. It conjures memory keepers.
No place, no need for memory keeper.
‘Place’ again, new memory keepers.
Isn’t the absence of them an adequate response to the current, descending, age?
I’m in the process of letting a place come into existence.
And looking at the family’s children as those starting out equipped with stories about this place. I wish for nothing more, because it’d be hybris to attempt to construct backwards what has clearly been broken.
Those stories are still facing tough competition from thr usual short-lived suspects, but they’ll come through if needed.
Right now, energy levels are still a bit too high for that, that’s all.
Did you read ‘Oil, Power and War’?
http://workingcows.net/ep-075-allan-savory-the-state-of-regenerative-agriculture/
Listening to the great man once again, I’m struck by something else:
If what he describes is correct (and I’m sure it is), then the keepers of memories have failed (most of) us when it comes when it comes to the land.
We’ve been getting by for millenia, famine and destruction following us wherever we go.
This is not something that we caused when fossil fuels became available.
Listening to him, I’m content to be a tiny nexus of proper planning and little else, clutching Mr. Savory’s aide-mémoire 🙂
I hear you, Michael. I am still convinced that the muscle memory of community and belonging must be exercised. I’d rather live with the keepers of memory, no matter how flawed, than to go it alone.
I haven’t read Oil, Power and War, worth it? BTW did you read Land of Little Rain, yet?
It’s lying on top of the pile, above ‘River Of Dark Dreams’ 🙂
It is waiting for me to quit watching seminars about agriculture.
And right now, it’s taking a backseat to a brand new and merry tradition, unheard of in any other part of the world, of which I am keeper/bankroller:
The annual repairing of the shed’s roof after a heavy storm.
Oh, Cousin, i do clearly remember playing checkers with granddaddy! He ragged me with the same exclamation! Your telling of it immediately brought it to mind! He also taught me to play 5card draw and we bet with either match sticks or tooth picks, whichever were most at hand. My devout baptist mother was quite distraught although she withheld her wrath from Granddady’s face and even spared the rod on me…
I was only about 9 or 10…such an innocent.
I can just imagine your mom biting her tongue while Granddaddy taught you to play poker.
Alan Savory committed what is for me an unforgivable error when he recommended and presided over the destruction of 40,000 African elephants in a mistaken attempt to restore disappearing and degraded savanna. See https://www.fastcompany.com/2681518/this-man-shot-40000-elephants-before-he-figured-out-that-herds-of-cows-can-save-the-planet
He admitted that his ecological model was ultimately wrong. Oops. Tell that to the dead elephants. Nothing turns feet into clay better than certainty and willingness to act.
I was already formulating my snarky reply in my mind (Facebook, silly!) before I got to your fifth and sixth paragraphs. They knocked the snark right out of me. What excellent observations and beautiful expression. Terrific encapsulation of our cultural moment. Bravo!
Beyond that, I will add that sociologist Anthony Giddens writes about the destruction of space (a modern affliction commencing several hundred years ago) and its concomitant effects on identity. As with so many things, we’ve been on this trajectory for a long, long time, but a real acceleration has occurred within the last 20 years or so, enabled by communications technologies that both free us and abandon us to unintended products of that freedom (“unmoored,” as you write). This follows the thoroughgoing transformation since the 19th century of traditional life ways into the modern money economy and its dominant urban social structure, away from the land and direct sources of sustenance and meaning. Ultimately, those old ways (not always salutary, I admit) have been abstracted and rendered moot for First World urbanites like me. Others elsewhere still remember.
Awe, shucks and kicks dirt, Brutus. Thanks. I’m not familiar with Anthony Giddens, yet another one to add to the reading list. Cheers,
Memory keeping has been on my mind a lot lately. My 97 year old mother recently passed away, and we buried her next to my father yesterday. My cousins were there and it was wonderful and I realized we are now the old ones and it is up to us to pass down the family history and memories. I was a very fortunate child, like you, I had a grandfather who loved to tell me stories and I loved to hang around him and listen. And every year we went to family reunion and I loved to sit and listen to the old folks talk and laugh and sing. And now they are all gone and it is up to us. I have four kids and five grandkids and I try to tell them our family’s stories and some care more than others. But that’s how my generation was, I cared more than some of my sisters. And because of that I know memories that stretch back to the Civil War..I feel blessed and honored to have these memories and I feel the necessity to pass them on.
Heather,
I’m sorry for your loss. But, my goodness, 97 years-old! You mention that connection with a memory that stretches back to the Civil War. That really resonated. Those familial leaps back in time really help ground you. I hope a few of those kids and grandkids take on the role of memory keeper for you.
My best,
What brilliant insight Brian!
It reminds me of our local historical society, where anyone under 70 is considered a youngster. Not a soul under 50 cares to hear the stories of the elders of their community, much less actually share some time with them. It is a black mark on this era we live in that history and our connection to it garners such little interest and respect.
A black mark indeed.
The demise of written correspondence and hard copy photographs is part of this change and loss. Family history is recorded in saved letters and photographs and that form of record no longer exists. Emails, instagrams, pictures stored electronically, etc. will not survive the generations as did the letters, newspaper clippings, telegrams, and photographs. I can trace my family through letters and pictures but my nephew’s military service is recorded in only a few letters from basic training. His time in Iraq was communicated via Facebook and emails. One thinks and writes differently on email than with pen and paper. I could go on for pages but you already understand. I appreciate the technology but it comes at a great price.
Thanks, Joan. Now I am officially depressed. 🙂 Yep, Cindy and I have been talking about this for years. I treasure letters in my collection from great-greats from the mid 1800’s. Think any of my kin will do the same in 100 years?
Sigh.
Brian,
I had access to my mother’s family more than my father’s. I learned the stories of one side more than any other. I often wonder about the pieces of my history I didn’t hear. I agree that our ability and access to our elders and their stories is beyond measure. But even in the absence of stories we are still the prroducts of evolution.
Who knows how our genetics and epigenitics play out. Humans like to have a direction to march. Maybe that direction is the arrow of our ancestors and the stories we remember. Maybe that direction is the one we feel most strongly even in the absence of stories! I love the stories my grandmother and parents told me. But stories are only a fragment of my past. Who we decide to be is also important,,,maybe the most important.
Our parents and grandparents never had the internet. They never had the access to the range of information we have available. We can learn from our past and learn from everyone’s past. We can imagine something our parents and grandparents may have never thought of. This is the a very interesting period in history.
I received this thoughtful and beautifully expressed response to this post in my inbox. It is from Sarah, a frequent commenter on these posts. I hope you enjoy it.
Brian,
I agree with your description, the list of reasons, the contexts that have brought us to where we are today. But I can also attest that it isn’t always a choice, or pride, or self-interested ignorance that isolates and separates us from our elders and from knowledge of the past. In my case, it was the actions of my parents, who divorced when I was a baby, and my mother’s actions after that, which precluded my having connections with all but one grandparent. That grandmother died when I was 13 years old. She was my adult friend and ally when I was little, but as the years went on I had fewer opportunities to be with her though we kept up a written correspondence. Interestingly, I have learned something of my grandmother’s adult life by reading letters that she wrote to a her distant sister-in-law, my great-aunt who was very close to my grandfather. (Letters that were saved and transcribed by my mother.) I wish that great-aunt on the other side of the continent could have been more in my life and I in hers. By the time I was old enough to figure out that I could do something to make that happen, she was gone too. My mother’s decades-long genealogy work has provided lineage and imagined stories. But this is not the same as interacting with a live person. Not like listening to my step-mother-in-law talk about working in Chicago as a young woman, the time she took the train to New York City, and other adventures. She was an elder who graced my life for too short a time.
I feel the lack of community connection deeply, feel the lack of the presence of elders and of being eldered, and I can’t imagine I’m alone in this. But perhaps it’s a generational ill—the baby boomers who grew up when there was still at least an ideal of the value of elders, family, connections, stories; when there were still old folks in the home and neighborhood; when there were fewer distractions, fewer job changes and resulting moves, fewer divorces and broken homes and blended families. As I enter my seventh decade I also feel uncertain about how to become an elder, and wonder what I might possibly have to offer to those younger than me.
So what do I do? So far I have been muddling along, taking small steps, nurturing relationships with my rural neighbors, stepping up when there is a way I can be helpful in the community. (As anyone who has moved to a rural area without any family connections knows, becoming part of the web takes a long, long time.) I’ve started working as a hospice volunteer and am following a calling to work in support of people who are dying. I see that as something I will age into, and continue for many years.
I am also engaged in insisting on being allowed to age. I want to model the reality of aging so it doesn’t seem scary and mysterious and impossible for the young. (And I don’t mean “model” in the sense of the fit, well-dressed, active folks in the ads where the only thing indicates their agedness is their gray hair.) Partly because I’m selfish and I want to experience that part of my life in its fullness and not have to hide it and ignore it, and because it’s so silly to pretend at that isn’t happening. But I also think we need to move on, to become old so the young can move up into the ranks of the middle-aged without having to compete with us for the privilege.
The thought of elderhood has been much on my mind as I study on all of this. On how we are aging (or not), how we are with the young and with the aged, how we treat history and memory, and what passes for wisdom these days. I think being a memory keeper and a storyteller is a critical part of being an elder. There is a sweet, nourishing side to this vision, nourishing the young and being a resource for the community in general. But for me it also includes having the courage to bring up the past when others would prefer that it be forgotten. We up-and-coming elders have the experience of living through an unprecedented acceleration in the rate of change in our world, and I think we can provide some assistance, some anchoring perhaps, in deep aspects of life. We also keep memories of how some things weren’t so great in the past, and those are things young folks need to hear from time to time.
Sarah
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