It All Began Here
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
My father has spent many months sifting through an attic room—searching for old ice skates, oboes, clarinets, report cards, ribbons, medals, his children's childhoods. News from the past surfaces almost every day. Revisions.
Working with my father not long ago, I came upon my mother's first photo scrapbook, which opens with the commemoration of my brother's birth. It All Began Here, she began, and square photo by square photo she proceeded to tell a story, her white pencil providing the grammar, the memoirist's view.
Lately I've been thinking about how much I struggle to tell stories that will speak to those I will never meet or know. And how finally, in the end, it's these private stories that matter most. The ones our mothers wrote down just for us. The ones we remember to rescue from time for those we see and touch.
3 comments:
"It All Began Here"....and what a splendid beginning it was!
Hi Beth -
Perhaps the most important story is the one we tell to ourselves - about ourselves. Perhaps this is why we write, to find the essence of this one, basic story. Perhaps this is why, through magnifying lenses, it is possible to detect this one, specific story, veiled in the many titles, book jackets, characters. Perhaps this is the writer’s underlying goal; to make this story grow and mature, like the crawling baby suddenly rising to his own two feet. Perhaps this is the writer’s greatest gift; to discover his own feet for then to pass on his knowledge to his readers.
Grete
Grete,
In every memoir, in every novel, in every poem, there is, I agree, that knowledge of self that allows us to imagine out, past, forward, beyond, so that we may pass we have come to see on.
b
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