Legacy MattersThat's what Hugh Hewitt says "Be sure to read it while you still have it."
Much as any columnist hates to say it, for most of you there is a better use of your time. If you have an aging mom or dad, or an elderly relative of any sort under the roof, you've got a novel in your living room, and I hope you take some time to at least skim its table of contents today.
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Time is marching on, and with it all the familiar stories. But chances are you haven't really heard them in a long time, if ever. Chances are your Rose Marie is honored and served, but rarely listened to at length, much less made the focus of a family conversation.
My suggestion is that you give it a try, but do so with a purpose. See if you can't keep Aunt Joan or Gramps focused on the story of their lives, so that at the end of an hour, you know the outline of their life --where they were born, where they lived, the names of their school and favorite teachers, and whether they had a pet and where they had their first kiss.
Here's Rose Marie's call.
Through Letters, a Family History Unveiled
A reporter's seven-year correspondence with his 93-year-old cousin, illustrator Sam Fink, reveals a family's past and the beauty in old-fashioned letter writing
"There's little grace in email," Sam tells me when I stop by to visit in November. "Part of grace occurs when a letter drops through the slot in the door and you decide how to open it." He says he plans what he'll write in his letters when he goes to bed, then starts typing in the morning. "I love the sound of the clackety clack of a typewriter."
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Sam wanted me to know about our family. His mother Tillie, who died in 1989 at age 97, was one of six siblings born before 1900. In his retelling, the clan became fantastical characters. Tillie was so determined to keep her ailing mother Betsey from committing suicide that she'd tie a string around her and her mother's arms when they went to bed, so Tillie would know if the old woman stirred. Two of Tillie's brothers were so clueless about their tea-totaling mother's anguish that they'd bring her brandy, which she'd rub into her knees to try to relieve arthritic pain.
What most amazed me about Sam Fink is his creative spurt at age 89.
While Ms. Tabori wasn't interested in an illustrated alphabet he had been pushing, she looked over Sam's other works and says she was knocked out by his earlier volume on the Constitution. She wanted to republish it, this time richly colored. The assignment, at age 89, led to a remarkable burst of creativity, in which Sam published four illustrated books over the following three years on the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, Exodus and a passage from an Annie Dillard book.
"The Constitution of the United States of America" features a whimsical sketch of a human spine to represent the country's backbone. To tie the Gettysburg Address to the aspirations of the founders, he drew tiny figures of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence and had them stand on a quill held by Lincoln. He says the famous documents embody freedom to him, the kind of freedom that let his illiterate grandmother immigrate to the U.S., and helped his family prosper.
I love this new blog Awkward family photos. Some make you wince; others are flat out hilarious.
If you have a photo like the one below submitted by Clare, it deserves inclusion in your personal legacy archives.
Otherwise, you'd better better off leaving out the awkward ones. Personal legacy archives are for the photos you love, not the ones that make you cringe.
“This is my mom, dad and brother in Sydney.
Posing on a bridge, my brother set the camera on timer, and ran back to join my parents.
However, he had too much momentum and fell back into the pond.”
Whittaker Chambers , an American writer and editor, was once a Communist party member and Soviet spy. After he renounced communism, he became an outspoken opponent and became most famous or infamous for his testimony against Alger Hiss ten years later, a U.S. State Department employee whom he accused of being a Soviet spy.
In 1952, Chambers's book Witness was published to widespread acclaim. The book was a combination of autobiography, an account of his role in the Hiss case and a warning about the dangers of Communism and liberalism. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. called it one of the greatest of all American autobiographies, and Ronald Reagan credited the book as the inspiration behind his conversion from a New Deal Democrat to a conservative Republican.
President Reagan awarded Chambers posthumously the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contribution to "the century's epic struggle between freedom and totalitarianism.
The excerpts below is a letter to his beloved children, from the forward to Witness.
I see in Communism the focus of the concentrated evil of our time. You will ask: Why, then, do men become Communists? How did it happen that you, our gentle and loved father, were once a Communist? Were you simply stupid? No, I was not stupid. Were you morally depraved? No, I was not morally depraved. Indeed, educated men become Communists chiefly for moral reasons. Did you not know that the crimes and horrors of Communism are inherent in Communism? Yes, I knew that fact. Then why did you become a Communist? It would help more to ask: How did it happen that this movement, once a mere muttering of political outcasts, became this immense force that now contests the mastery of mankind? Even when all the chances and mistakes of history are allowed for, the answer must be: Communism makes some profound appeal to the human mind.
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The revolutionary heart of Communism is not the theatrical appeal: "Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to gain." It is a simple statement of Karl Marx, further simplified for handy use: "Philosophers have explained the world; it is necessary to change the world."
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How did you break with Communism? My answer is: Slowly, reluctantly, in agony. Yet my break began long before I heard those screams. Perhaps it does for everyone. I do not know how far back it began. Avalanches gather force and crash, unheard, in men as in the mountains. But I date my break from a very casual happening. I was sitting in our apartment on St. Paul Street in Baltimore. It was shortly before we moved to Alger Hiss's apartment in Washington. My daughter was in her high chair. I was watching her eat. She was the most miraculous thing that had ever happened in my life. I liked to watch her even when she smeared porridge on her face or dropped it meditatively on the Hoor. My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear-those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: "No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design." The thought was involuntary and unwanted. I crowded it out of my mind. But I never wholly forgot it or the occasion. I had to crowd it out of my mind. If I had completed it, I should have had to say: Design presupposes God. I did not then know that, at that moment, the finger of God was first laid upon my forehead.
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The crisis of Communism exists to the degree in which it has failed to free the peoples that it rules from God. Nobody knows this better than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The crisis of the Western world exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God. It exists to the degree in which the Western world 'actually shares Communism's materialist vision, is so dazzled by the logic of the materialist interpretation of history, politics and economics, that it fails to grasp that, for it, the only possible answer to the Communist challenge: Faith in God or Faith in Man? is the challenge: Faith in God.
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My dear children, before I close this foreword, I want to recall to you briefly the life that we led in the ten years between the time when I broke with Communism and the time when I began to testify-the things we did, worked for, loved, believed in. For it was that happy life, which, on the human side, in part made it possible for me to do later on the things I had to do, or endure the things that happened to me.
Those were the days of the happy little worries, which then seemed so big
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The farm was your kingdom, and the world lay far beyond the protecting walls thrown up by work and love.
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Thus, as children, you experienced two of the most important things men ever know-the wonder of life and the wonder of the universe, the wonder of life within the wonder of the universe. More important, you knew them not from books, not from lectures, but simply from living among them.
via American Digest
Rod Dreher points to the documentary "Anna' where Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov asked his daughter the same questions each year from the time she was six until she was 17 and so documenting her growing moral awareness and maturity.
For young parents, this is a great way to capture the lives of your children over time
Here are the six questions:
What do you love the most?
What do you hate the most?
What scares you the most?
What do you want more than anything right now?
What do you expect from life?
What does the homeland mean to you?
The Past is Alive in Time Capsules
Most of us want to be remembered, appreciated, and looked up to. We want a part of our past to be left behind for others to find and to ponder. The existence of time capsules has allowed us to do this.
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there are those that are unintentional and wind up being discovered thousands of years later after they were placed in the ground
See what's in some famous time capsules at the link.
Wow! There's an International Time Capsule Society
Via Neatorama
Joseph Bottom of First Things on The Judgment of Memory
Every memoir of childhood is necessarily overshadowed by parents, and I could find, were I to turn my mind that way, stories of my father's drinking, his pretension, his bounce.
But my father, being dead, is not here either to be triumphed over by my telling of those stories or to defend himself against them. The death of parents leaves their honor in their children's hands, and the cruel accuracies we might fling in anger against them while they are alive seem even more wrong to use against them once they are gone. “To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, only truth,” Voltaire once opined. It's a good line: high-minded, confident, sententious in the way only enlightened French philosophes could manage with any aplomb. But it also feels exactly backward, particularly about those we knew and loved. To squabble with our vanished parents about how they lived their lives seems more than a metaphysical nullity. It is, in fact, a moral failing.
If love is true—that is to say, a true thing: a really existing object to which the universe itself must bend—then there remains a place for reticence, and secrets swallowed, and the dead allowed to keep their darkness to themselves.
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Memory may be our best tool for self-understanding, but only when we remember how weak a tool it really is: prone to warping under the narrative drive of storytelling, vulnerable to self-interest, susceptible to outside influence.
'You send your daughter away to study and she doesn't come back. We will never, ever get over it.'
A quite spectacular murder trial is underway in Italy. British student Meredith Kercher was found murdered in her apartment in the Umbrian town of Perugia, her throat cut. She shared the apartment with an American girl from Seattle with an 'angel face', Amanda Knox, who is charged with the murder along with her former lover, Raffaele Solllecito. Another man, Rudy Guede, described as an "Ivory-coast drifter," was charged in the murder as well and is now serving a 30-year sentence.
Details of the murder can be found in a Wikipedia entry.
Kecher's family released a music video starring the murdered British student that's quite eerie. Haunting I would call it.
He said: 'It was made by a group of Meredith's friends sometime during 2007 - I think she knows the lead singer.
'The people on the video are friends of hers who were at Leeds University and it is unreal to see her in the video and to know that a few months later she was murdered.
'It was a very emotional experience for them to come and give evidence but they coped very well.
'They just wanted the court to know what a special and much loved person Meredith was not just to her family but all her friends as well.'
In the opening sequence, Meredith is seen walking down a flight of stairs and makes several other appearances including a haunting scene where she walks through a set of doors and looks straight at the camera.
In another shot, she again looks directly at the camera before glancing at the singer, as snow appears to be falling around.
Ancient Manuscripts in a Digital Age The slideshow
In an increasingly digital era, researchers are racing to track down and digitize rare, ancient manuscripts. Father Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk from Minnesota, is at the forefront of the fight. He's traveled to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey and Georgia to search for endangered Christian manuscripts to digitize before they are looted or destroyed. Similar efforts are under way around the world as companies and foundations finance major efforts to digitally preserve culturally significant artifacts
While conservationists are quick to stress that pixels and bytes can never replace priceless physical artifacts, many see digitization as a vital tool for increasing public access to rare items, while at the same time creating a disaster-proof record and perhaps unearthing new information.
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One of the most ambitious digital preservation projects is being led, fittingly, by a Benedictine monk. Father Columba Stewart, executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John's Abbey and University in Minnesota, cites his monastic order's long tradition of copying texts to ensure their survival as inspiration.
His mission: digitizing some 30,000 endangered manuscripts within the Eastern Christian traditions, a canon that includes liturgical texts, Biblical commentaries and historical accounts in half a dozen languages, including Arabic, Coptic and Syriac, the written form of Aramaic. Rev. Stewart has expanded the library's work to 23 sites, including collections in Syria, Lebanon and Turkey, up from two in 2003. He has overseen the digital preservation of some 16,500 manuscripts, some of which date to the 10th and 11th centuries. Some works photographed by the monastery have since turned up on the black market or eBay, he says.
Two days after Rodrigo Roseburg made this video in Guatemala City, while riding his bike, he was shot and died on the street.
Guatemala in uproar after lawyer predicts his own murder.
"If you are hearing this message," Rosenberg begins, "unfortunately, it is because I have been murdered by the president's private secretary, Gustavo Alejos, and his partner, Gregorio Valdez, with the approval of Álvaro Colom and Sandra de Colom [Guatemala's president and first lady].
"I do not want to be a hero," Rosenberg says at one point during the sensational video that was distributed at his funeral on Monday, but he has now become a martyr in a nation weary of drug running, money laundering and corruption, and with one of the highest murder rates in the world.
Rosenberg explains that he was a lawyer who would have preferred to continue quietly practising his profession, but it was the murder of two clients in April that led directly to his own death.
Maureen Callahan says The final frontier in reality television has been crossed with the broadcast Friday of "Farrah's Story"
But amid this week's non-stop media coverage of the special, replete with a red-carpet premiere and interviews with her on-again paramour Ryan O'Neal - who, ever the gentleman, referred to Fawcett in the past tense - one question has yet to be asked: Is this weird? Or is this just the natural progression of things, the logical next step in a culture where the pace of oversharing and electronic communications are perfectly, symbiotically matched?
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Fawcett herself, as she has throughout her career, comes off as extremely likeable and well-intentioned, if - like most celebrities of her era - a bit unhooked from the actual world. She rails against the lack of funding for research into cancers such as hers, and bemoans the lack of experimental treatments in the US. Yet it does not register with her that her wealth and fame, which afford her private jets to Germany and an international team of doctors, are unavailable to the vast majority of cancer sufferers, and that, if not for her station in life, she would not have had extra time. She does not seem to wrestle, at all, with the notion that there may be some experiences best kept private, that the unintended consequences of oversharing can be a cheapening and coarsening of the most meaningful moments.
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Fawcett's story, of course, is real, and it will be interesting to see how many Americans watched, and if the nation's attitudes towards death - really the last taboo - begin to change. Maybe death will be discussed more openly, or maybe most people will decide that it's too ghoulish, too voyeuristic, to watch a deathbed goodbye, to watch an American icon of youth and beauty waste away.
I didn't see it, but I don't think I would have watched. I know these people have lived all their lives before a camera, but to me making such private moments public lacks dignity. Watching someone die is a profound and deep moment. Making a private video for family members is one thing, making a public show about it is another.
If you're making a digital scrapbook and wish you had a telegram to include or if you just want to send an old-fashioned telegram today you can for $4.70, all from your computer at TelegramStop
via Book of Joe.
Nathaniel Grimsby, born in 1811 in Kansas, though old when it broke out, fought in the Civil War becoming a second lieutenant and a "picturesque figure".
From When Kansas Was Young by Thomas Allen McNeal
He was a Republican without variableness or shadow of turning. To his mind, politically speaking, the Republican party was summum bonum, while the Democratic party was malum in se. Whatever there was of good in the political acts of the past third of a century, he attributed to the Republican party, and whatever there was of evil to the malign influence of the Democratic organization. With most men political activity stops with the grave, but old Nathaniel Grigsby, as the weight of years bowed his back and the frosts of time, silvered his hair, knowing that his years were nearly numbered, devised a plan by which his political opinions might be transmitted to coming generations, carved in imperishable granite, to be read long after his mortal body had returned to the earth from which it came and his spirit had joined the immortals. He carefully prepared the inscription for his tombstone and exacted the promise it should be graven on the shaft which marked his grave
Hat tip to Paul, Thoughts of a Regular Guy
Sadly, MotherPie, one of my favorites, is winding down her blog. With all best wishes in her new transition which may have something to do with 12 Mighty Orphans.
You can see why I will miss her with these excerpts from two of her last posts.
Sometimes it takes literally years and years and years to understand or even know what has been significant. Time must pass to understand the larger meaning of a thing, to put perspective on life, to see how beginnings actually end.
That has certainly been the case with the inspiring and true story of 12 Mighty Orphans.
Martin Luther King's briefcase shows us the totemic significance of what was carried on anyone's last day before sudden death.
Strength to Love. That is the book he authored (a collection of his sermons) that was in Martin Luther King's briefcase, right, open as he packed it, in his hotel the day he was shot. These never before released photos from the day he died by Henry Groskinsky for Life magazine.
"Strength to Love" (Martin Luther, Jr. King)
Christopher Buckley on Growing Up the Only Child of the Charismatic and Complicated Buckleys
One realization does dawn upon the death of the second parent, namely that you’ve now moved into the green room to the River Styx. You’re next. Another thing about parental mortality: No matter how much you’ve prepared for the moment, when it comes, it comes at you hot, hard and unrehearsed.
This excerpt in the New York Times Magazine is part of Chris Buckley's New Book "Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir"
Thousands attend funeral of the 4 Oakland police officers slain last week
...some 19,000 law-enforcement officers from coast to coast gathered along with grateful community members at the Oracle Arena in Oakland for a final send-off for their brothers in blue.
All four veteran officers died Saturday when a wanted parolee, 26-year-old Lovelle Mixon, opened fire in separate incidents just hours apart in East Oakland.
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A rumbling cortege of motorcycle officers escorted each hearse to the arena, keeping a tight and sharp formation just as Dunakin would have liked it, his colleagues said. They passed underneath a giant American flag hanging between the extended ladders of two Oakland fire trucks. Hundreds of police vehicles, from bomb-squad trucks, motorcycles, Ford Crown Victoria and Dodge Charger cruisers, filled the parking lot.
There were police cars from Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Boston and New York and a rainbow of uniforms that filled the arena and the adjacent Oakland Coliseum, where an overflow crowd watched the service on two big screens.
Their badges wrapped with black bands of mourning, hundreds of officers in dress uniforms lined the steps outside the arena and saluted as one by one, honor guards escorted four flag-draped caskets inside, followed by the officers' families. A sign at the complex read, "Forever Heroes."
Many officers dabbed at their eyes with white gloves as the caskets were placed in front of a flower-adorned stage beside their pictures. The police motorcycles of Dunakin and Hege and two pairs of empty boots sat nearby.
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After the funeral, the officers were to be honored with a 21-gun salute from a military cannon, and 20 helicopters from across the nation were to fly in a "missing man" formation. Miles-long formations of police cars, their emergency lights whirling,
The four slain
Oakland police Sgt. Mark Dunakin, or "Dunny," as everybody called him, was a big teddy bear and die-hard Ohio State Buckeyes and Pittsburgh Steelers fan who proudly patrolled the streets on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Traffic Officer John Hege was a "beer and brownie man" who combined his love for the department and the Oakland Raiders by working overtime at the Coliseum during home games.
SWAT Sgt. Ervin Romans was a former Marine Corps drill sergeant, a "tactical guru" and expert marksman who instilled the importance of safety on the hundreds of officers he trained.
Sgt. Daniel Sakai juggled the duties of being a patrol sergeant and a SWAT entry team leader, yet still insisted on working out and running with officers preparing to take a grueling physical test.
8 hour caravan from Orange County.
Last Saturday, 26-year-old Lovelle Mixon shot and killed officers Erv Romans, 43, Mark Dunakin, 40, and Dan Sakai, 35. A fourth officer, John Hege, 41, was taken off live support after being declared brain dead.
Mixon was wanted for a parole violation, and opened fire during a traffic stop before heading home and opening fire on SWAT officers who were pursuing him with an AK-47, officials said.
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When the caravan arrived, the cars and motorcycles drove past Oracle Arena in a singe-file line and shone their lights in a display of respect.
The Bookworm said some 80 police officers from Boston and even representatives from Scotland Yard were expected. The Bookworm is a new blog for me that I discovered via links from the Anchoress and American Digest . She said something at the end of her post that warmed my heart.
I always view tragedies like this as reminders — reminders not to wait until it’s too late to say how you value someone. No matter the heart-felt outpouring at today’s memorial service, friends, family, colleagues and politicos will be saying things that Sgts. Mark Dunakin, 40, Erv Romans, 43, Daniel Sakai, 35, and Officer John Hege, 41, won’t be around to hear.
When my Mom turned 80, I temporarily stole her address book and wrote to every living person in it asking them to send a letter with a personal message and a remembrance about her. Photos would be welcome too. My sister, who is artistic, then assembled the dozens of responses in a beautiful album. My mother almost cried when she got the album and (this is true) carried it with her everywhere she went for almost a year. To know, not only that her friends loved and valued her, but why they did so, meant everything to her.
Don’t wait until those near you die before you open your mouth and say the things you should have said before. Tell your family members you love them — and tell them why. Give your friend a true compliment — a deep one, about his or her personality, not just the usual “great shirt,” or “nice hair” kind of thing. Praise a colleague’s work. These things matter, and one of the greatest regrets we always have when people die is all the things we should have said before.
It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees , wit half a date dangling after and a question mark.
My father's happiness not only redeemed him, but drove him to stories, and keeps him even now alive in me, lie a second more patient and more pleasing soul within my poor soul.
I loved this book set in Ireland and the beautiful, lyrical prose of its author who was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2008.
Sebastian Barry writes about the beautiful Roseanne Cleary McNulty, a 100-year-old woman in a mental asylum for far more than fifty years who is secretly writing the story of her early life (the Secret Scripture of the title) and hiding it under the floorboards in her room.
Dr. Grene, a psychiatrist in charge of deciding what is to happen to each of the patients when the asylum closes- and so Roseanne's fate- becomes fascinated by Roseanne's resilience and lack of bitterness and soon begins to uncover the truth of why she was sent to the asylum in the first place.
"The Secret Scripture" (Sebastian Barry)
Here's another few snippets:
It is always worth itemizing happiness, there is so much of the other thing in life, you had better put down the markets for happiness while you can.
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We are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.
Some tips on Drawing Out Wisdom from Parents
Even though my parents lived into their 70s and 80s, I could never bring myself to ask them some important questions about the lessons they’d learned in life. Like many of my generation, I went straight from prolonged adolescent rebellion to reluctant adult caregiving without pausing to wonder what grown-up wisdom my parents might have to offer…until it was too late.
Henry Alford didn’t make that mistake. The author of “How to Live: A Search for Wisdom From Old People” not only persuaded his mother and stepfather to talk candidly about their lives, he managed to get all kinds of colorful and famous people over age 70 — including Phyllis Diller, Harold Bloom and Edward Albee — to share the wisdom, and in some cases the folly, of their life experiences. His 262-page book is filled with their insights, along with deathbed confessions, excerpts from diaries and an exploration of the meaning of wisdom itself
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Whether your parents are eccentric, crotchety or boring, Mr. Alford’s techniques may help you get them to open up and share their wisdom. Here’s what he told me.
• “Explain to them specifically why you want to interview them, and what people who read or watch the interview stand to gain from the experience.” Tell them if you want to keep the stories all for yourself. Or perhaps you want to pass them on to your children.
• “Pace yourself — don’t open with a question about sex, war crimes or contemporary recording artists.”
• “Exhibit the manner or behavior you’re hoping to elicit — be philosophical to incite philosophizing, be potty-mouthed to incite potty-mouthism.”
• Do not expect earth-shattering revelations. If your parents are eating out of trash cans or busy putting together Ponzi schemes, you probably are already on to them.
• Do not fear that delving into the past will precipitate a family rift — unless one is on the verge of happening anyway, which was the situation in Mr. Alford’s family. Shortly after his interview, Mr. Alford’s stepfather overdosed on sleeping pills, which caused Mr. Alford’s mother, furious that her husband of more than 30 years had abandoned his commitment to sobriety, to throw him out of the house, end the marriage and move by herself to a retirement community 580 miles away.
• As they reflect on their life experiences, urge your parents to go beyond pearls of wisdom and clichés like “Life is a journey,” “Do what you love,” or “Accept what you can’t change.” Instead, urge them to relate their own personal, idiosyncratic nuggets of wisdom. Mr. Alford dubs these summations of life’s wisdom “elderisms.” (In his book, he explains the “rules” for constructing a proper elderism are like those for creating an aphorism: it must be brief, definitive, personal and have a twist.)
Close to 30,000,000 people were killed by the communists in the USSR, not including deaths from the Second World War.
Russian civil war (1917-1922) 9,000,000 deaths.
Soviet Union under Stalin (1924-1953) 20,000,000 deaths.
Jon Utley's father was one of them. Jon was only two years old when his father, Arcadi Berdichevsky, a Russian trade official, was sent to a Soviet labor camp by the Soviet secret police. Because his mother was a British intellectual , she was able to escape with her young son and from there to the USA.
Beginning in 2004, Jon Utley began a search to find out what happened to his father. Reason.TV now is making available online the 30 minute documentary Jon Utley's Search for his father which I highly recommend.
So much of what happened under the communists has been "lost in an historical abyss", so it's heartening to see Russians in the north, the Komey republic, constructing memorials to the executed prisoners who built much of their cities and piecing together files so that descendants can find out what happened to their parents and ancestors who died as prisoners in labor camps.
Jon Utley found the place where his father was executed. He saw the surroundings, the land and considered a great gift to do so before he died. There he found a sense of peace, a continuity of being with his long-dead father.
Seventy years later, witness is still being made.
He kept a locked chest in the garden shed and always "politely refused to say" what was in it when his wife asked.
After he died and she was clearing out some things when...
"My curiosity got the better of me. I didn't know what would be inside.
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What Mrs Rowlands found was a treasure trove of children's toys dating back to when her husband was a boy and that he had kept lovingly under wraps for over 70 years.
Mr Rowlands had packed away his favourite things in the chest when the Second World War broke out and kept them in there but never told anyone of the wonderful array of 1920s and 30s games, wooden toys and animals.
Mrs Rowlands said: "Inside was a clockwork train set, clockwork helicopter, soldiers made of lead and wooden farm and zoo animals all from the 1920s and 30s.
"It was amazing. There were home-made farm buildings, a wooden alphabet, and game of snakes and ladders and ludo.
"I also found a small tin containing marbles, broken toys, nuts and bolts - just the things which might have been found in the pockets of a small boy during the 1930s."
Widow find's dead husband's secret toy treasure trove hidden in shed.
Here's a sweet story and a radio piece about the bus driver dad in southern California who sent a postcard every day to his daughter attending college at Mt. Holyoke.
Please Respond to My Enquiries, Thank You
Of course, she was the envy of her fellow students. How everyone hungers for the love of a father.
The New York Times has begun a wonderful new feature called One in 8 Million. Each is a two-minute story about one person in New York City.
Using still photos with an audio voiceover, these stories are wonderful examples of how you can build your own Legacy Archives with stories about yourself and your family
Recording studio in hospital about more than music
Just down the hall from the chemo infusion rooms at Texas Children's Hospital, Jalen Huckabay was about to slip into another world, away from the wearying regimen of pokes, prods and pinches she'd endured since being diagnosed with lymphoma in November.For the next few hours, the curly-haired, cherub-faced 16-year-old would become a songwriter.
Purple Songs Can Fly, a one-of-a-kind program at one of the country's largest pediatric cancer care facilities, gives patients a chance to record their own songs in a fully equipped recording studio at the hospital.
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It had been less than two hours since Jalen entered the Purple Songs studio. Her initial reluctance had evaporated. Now, she wanted everyone to hear the song.
"MYD's my yippin' dog. Got her last Christmas on the 23rd ... If you give her a bath. She attacks the towel. If you make her mad. She will growl ... Yip. Yip. Yip. Yip."
Kruse had taken Jalen's lyrics, and added a bouncy music track with a thumping bass and lively melody meant to evoke the antics of a mischievous dog. Then Jalen recorded several vocal tracks, creating the illusion of back-up singers. It was Jalen's idea to throw in a few yips for fun.
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"That's the most animated I've ever seen her," Dreyer said later. "She's been transformed today and that giddiness will sustain her through her chemo session.
"We're trying to get kids through cancer, so the more fun we can make it, the better their response is to everything," Dreyer said. "It will give them a chance to get beyond this."
Don't you think those recordings will be treasured for years. Those songs will be especially valuable to their families if some of the children don't survive for long.
As you ponder what to save in your personal legacy archives, a description of your daily routine is always revealing and often interesting as this blog Daily Routines proves.
Dip in and see how writers, artists and other interesting people organize their days.
From online baby blogs to printed baby books
To wit: Kidmondo, which we covered this summer, has since added a print option to its offerings. Through a partnership with custom publishing platform Sharedbook, Kidmondo now gives parents a fast and easy way to turn all the content they create online into a "KidBook" in the brick-and-mortar world. Users can pick which parts of the online journal they want to include in the book as well as customizing the content, cover, titles and more. Pricing for the KidBook begins at USD 28 for a perfect-bound softcover book with 20 full-colour pages and free US shipping. Hardcover is also available, and additional pages can be added for USD 0.50 each. KidBooks are currently available only in English, but Kidmondo hopes to accommodate other languages in the future, it says.
BabyChapters, meanwhile, is another site that lets parents share their baby's precious moments with family and friends in a safe and secure way, and also offers an online-offline combination. After creating their free online baby book, parents can select the chapters they'd like to include in a hardcover print version. Prices begin at USD 27.95 for a 24-page book, with a 20 percent discount for additional copies. Los Angeles-based BabyChapters launched in April.
As heirs to Western civilization, our common legacy as is so vast and so great, we can not take it all in. At best, we dip into it from time to time, sometimes as a citizen when we vote or speak against the government without any fear ; sometimes as believers when we gather in faith communities to worship God without any thought that we may be endangering our lives. Other times we are transported in a museum before a Renaissance painting or a Greek sculpture or in a symphony hall listening to Bach's St. Matthew's Passion.
But often we depend on others to communicate the greatness of someone long dead but whose legacy still nourishes minds and hearts. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was such a man.
According to George Eliot, Goethe was "Germany's greatest man of letters. —poet, critic, playwright, and novelist—and the last true polymath to walk the earth." I suppose he holds a similar position in the German imagination as Thomas Jefferson, another polymath, holds in the American imagination.
The Reader's Companion to World Literature says
Goethe comes as close to deserving the title of a universal genius as any man who has ever lived. though he will be considered here as a man of letters, it is important to remember that he had an intelligent grasp of all the arts, that he successfully carried burdensome responsibilities as a public administrator, and that his scientific interests led him to make significant contributions to mineralogy, optics, comparative anatomy and plant morphology.
Today we look to bloggers who write about what they love. Elizabeth Powers is the Goethe girl, a writer and literary scholar with a Ph.D in German literature and a consultant to the Metropolitan Museum. She loves Goethe and has begun a blog Goethe Etc. that vibrates with sympathy with this great man and, like him, is interested and learned about many things.
Maybe that's how we ordinary people can preserve Western civilization. By writing about what we love and value, sharing our appreciation with the world and passing it on to the people we love.
Maybe we only have time for quick bites of what we most need - the accumulated wisdom of the past. For me, quick bites are quotes and here are some:
On Character: Talents are best nurtured in solitude; character is best formed in the stormy billows of the world.
On Courtesy: There is a courtesy of the heart; it is allied to love.—From it springs the purest courtesy in the outward behavior....There is no outward sign of true courtesy that does not rest on a deep moral foundation.
On Happiness: The most happy man is he who knows how to bring into relation the end and the beginning of his life. One has only to grow older to become more tolerant. I see no fault that I might not have committed myself.
On Kindness: Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.
On Life: Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character. Life is the childhood of our immortality.
On Love: We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
On Immortality: Those who hope for no other life are dead even for this.
On Architecture: I call architecture frozen music.
On Nature: Nature is the living, visible garment of God.
On Riches: Riches amassed in haste will diminish, but those collected by little and little will multiply.
On the Bible: It is a belief in the Bible, the fruit of deep meditation, which has served me as the guide of my moral and literary life.—I have found it a capital safely invested, and richly productive of interest.
And others I liked
Things that matter most must never be at the mercy of things that matter least.
Which is the best government? That which teaches us to govern ourselves.
First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth.
Would that we all had the talent that Joseph Bottum does in recalling a long-ago Dakota Thanksgiving. Better yet an Aunt Eleanor.
Aunt Eleanor turned to look at me directly, and her face was hard with something I couldn’t quite understand. “And do you see why? It’s because they were parents. And that’s what it means to be a parent. They had already given up their lives for their child’s, from the first moment he existed.”
She sighed again and looked back out at the river. “In that blizzard, the bill finally came due, and they knew they had to pay it—the way you will pay it, when your time comes. The way your mother and father will pay it, when they have to. That’s what I want you to remember the next time you’re angry with them, the next time you want to scream because they won’t let you do something, the next time you feel as though nobody understands how grown up you’ve become.”
She glanced over at me and smiled, pulling her cloth sleeve up over her hand to wipe the windshield. “Come,” she said, “it’s time to get back home.”
Years later, I came to see my great-aunt’s story as the answer to utilitarianism and the ethics of calculation, the solution to those “lifeboat cases” we were supposed to ponder in freshman philosophy courses. But at the time I knew only that she was trying, in her way, to let me in on the secret, the mystery of adulthood. We turned away from the cold, gurgling river and drove back up the hill to the house on Elizabeth Street. Dinner was just beginning, and the arguments were already starting to swirl around the quarrelsome table. But my father winked at me across the half-carved turkey. And just as I realized how hungry I was, my mother set before me a plate filled with bright orange yams, green beans, the dark drumstick meat I loved, cranberry sauce, sage dressing—the kind of meal a fourteen-year-old boy imagines every meal should be. My parents were happy that Thanksgiving, I think, and why not? They had each other, they had their children, and they had their family, however much it squabbled and fought, gathered around them.
Following the disastrous Gallipoli campaign, in the summer of 1915, Winston Churchill volunteered for the Western front and like other soldiers left a death letter.
He celebrated the love he felt for Clementine, his wife of seven years. He wrote to her: 'You have taught me how noble a woman's heart can be.'
He was also dismissive of his own mortality, imploring Clementine: 'Do not grieve for me too much... death is only an incident, and not the most important...'
And, in a flash of the bullish nature that would see him rally the nation as war leader in 1940, he begged his wife to guard his papers from his 'Admiralty administration'.
'Some day I should like the truth to be known,' he wrote, confident history would vindicate him over Gallipoli, the failed attempt to capture Constantinople to gain a sea route to Russia, which led to huge British and Commonwealth casualties.
She made memory boxes for her two young sons containing keepsakes like a bottle of her perfume and a recorded song and letters telling them how they should behave like avoiding "negative moaning, consider other people's feeling and not to be afraid to make mistakes.
Now, Sandra Carey-Boggins has died of breast cancer.
She was informed the disease had spread to such an extent that it was beyond treatment. But after being told the news, she embarked on a journey to fulfill as many of her lifetime ambitions as possible.
A month after being told her condition was terminal, she married Tom, her partner of four years. She also took part in kayaking, power-boating, quad-biking, hot air ballooning and a holiday to New Zealand.
Her mother, Mavis Wise, said: 'She passed away very peacefully.'
A recipe for Toxic Photo Soup: Layer 1,000 photos in a large, watertight plastic storage tub. Place high on basement shelving unit. Fail to notice small, leaky basement window nearby. Marinate, unattended, three to four years. Open and serve.
Yield: 1,000 blank sheets of sopping photo paper and four gallons of black, stinky, toxic rainwater-chemical soup.
Yes, it's time to digitize your photos. David Pogue has advice on various services to scan your photos in Your Photos, Off the Shelf at Last.
I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop
REMOVING her ex-husband from more than a decade of memories may take a lifetime for Laura Horn, a police emergency dispatcher in Rochester. But removing him from a dozen years of vacation photographs took only hours, with some deft mouse work from a willing friend who was proficient in Photoshop, the popular digital-image editing program.
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In an age of digital manipulation, many people believe that snapshots and family photos need no longer stand as a definitive record of what was, but instead, of what they wish it was.
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“What we’re doing,” Mr. Johnson said, “is fulfilling the wish that all of us have to make reality to our liking.”
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Alan D. Entin, a clinical psychologist in Richmond, Va., uses patients’ family photographs as raw material to inspire discussion and analysis of their roles and relationships within their family.
“They’re a record,” he said. “They have existed over time and space. They are important documents.”
To alter them is to invite self-deception, he said. “The value to accepting a photograph of yourself as you are is that you’re accepting the reality of who you are, and how you look, and accepting yourself that way, warts and all. I think the pictures you hate say as much about you as pictures you love.”
This photographic journal of an artist's last days with his father is both beautiful and moving, if a bit bewildering in its navigation.
Philip Toledano's Days with My Father,
He spent 30 years tracing his family tree all the way back to William the Conquerer.
Ah yes, Roy's scrapbooks. The 76-year-old has quite a few of them. He has just finished compiling what is thought to be the world's biggest family tree.
It takes in 9,394 relatives, including King Henry I and Alfred the Great, and stretches back 1,500 years, all the way to AD500 when Cerdic of Wessex (another of his ancestors) was on the throne.
Compiling it has involved three decades - Roy started in 1980 - of poring over old papers from rarely disturbed filing cabinets in county records offices, inspecting inscriptions on graves, and struggling to read old-fashioned script in parish registers and wills. The project has cost Roy £20,000.
That's 45 generations!
Why do women hate photographs of themselves?
Talking to my friends, I realise that most of us have hundreds of pictures of our children, our partners, our friends, but scarcely a single one of ourselves.
My friend Helen - slim, attractive and stylish - confessed to me recently that she is photo-phobic. “From looking at our photographs, you'd think my husband was married to the au pair. If I died tomorrow, my children would hardly have a single photograph to remember me by,” she says.
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“Photographs aren't very representative of what we look like in reality,” she says. “It is just a record of one static moment. People are never completely still like they are in a photograph, and animation changes the way we look. In studies, people are often rated as significantly better-looking in person than in photographs, and that's because of personal qualities, such as confidence.”
Ironically, for all my dislike of cameras, I regret that I have so few photos as records of my personal history. I have scarcely a single picture of myself in my twenties, for example.
And oddly, when I look at old photos of me, ones that I loathed at the time I now think look fine. Where once I saw old and fat, I now see young and slim. So, tell me: why will I still be sitting at the PC deleting this year's crop as usual?
Kevin Kelly's blog Cool Tools is a favorite of mine because I'm always finding good information about products and services that make life easier.
He's found a service that can scan your old photos and slides cheaply called Scancafe.
Here is how it works: You pack up your images and mail them to ScanCafe's headquarters in Northern California. They count them up, and repackage them before shipping the pieces to India. In India they are scanned, touched up, rotated and then privately posted to your account at their website. You then go through the images online and select the ones you want to keep. You are allowed to dismiss (and not pay for) up to 50% of the total for that order. You can reject the images because you aren't happy with how they look online, or simply because you don't want the image. In the specific case of original photo negatives, there is no reliable way to communicate which image(s) you want on the strip, so ScanCafe will scan the entire strip of negatives. You'll have to reject the particular frames you don't want (but no more than 50% of the total order. Combine them with slides to keep your percentage down.)
After you've made your selection, ScanCafe will send the originals back to the US and then from CA they will ship you a DVD/CD with your images and your originals. It takes 7-8 weeks door to door. The quality of the scan is great for everything except huge billboard enlargements. The photos are scanned at 3000 dpi which gives a file about the quality of a 7 megapixel digital shot. You can scoop the final jpeg images into iPhoto or Flick'r or Blurb books. They are rotated into correct up-down/sidways orientation by hand.
Some people are concerned about sending their precious originals to India - or anywhere for that matter. They should not be. ScanCafe has a very elaborate tracking and shipping system that would work even if you were shipping jewels. Their scanning facilities in Bangalore are more organized than you are. I have more trust in this system that I would handing them over to any neighborhood scanner.
I have a big crate of old slides and photo albums just waiting to be scanned. So far, I've taken a number of slides to my neighborhood camera store for a specific project and been pleased with the results. If any of you have used ScanCafe, I'd be interested in your experience.
Adriana Lukas muses on the new museum in Hungary dedicated to Nazism and Communism in House of Terror.
I believe that the best and only way to understand Communism and Nazism is through the lives of individuals who were affected by it not through a historical methodology or chronological exposition.
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Everyday life is as important to understanding of what happens as are historical milestones. It might help people realise how little it takes for the society to find itself in a grasp of a toxic ideology and how gradual the decline can be, how unnoticed the erosion of freedom, dignity and moral strength.
You too are a witness to history. What will you say about the history you've seen to your children and your children's children?
How my baby helped me discover the tragic mother I never knew
For good or ill, most of us see flashes of our mothers in our daughters - but for me it's both shocking and exquisitely sweet, because my mother has been dead for more than 30 years.
I never knew her, and that's why it's so wonderful to find shades of her again now. She's there in the glint of my daughter's smile, in her infectious laugh and sparkiness; but most of all, she's there in the love I have for Nancy.
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But I knew, however painful it might be, that I had to find the true essence of my mother.
Tentatively, I asked my mother's brothers and sister to write down their memories of her. (Sadly, my grandmother is now dead and my grandfather is very old.) I needed to know who my mother was. I needed to discover what she would have wanted for me.
I needed to know mundane details about her. Which hand did she write with? What made her happy? What made her laugh? For the first time in over 30 years, I wanted her existence to be acknowledged.
Because he was the most important man in my life, it doesn't seem so long since he's been gone even though my father died sixteen years ago.
In fact, I got a letter from him, or part of one, just last month.
In the course of getting ready to sell the family house after my mother's death, some fifty years of accumulated stuff had to be gone through and decisions made as to where all the stuff was to go.
Going through some old files, my brother Kevin found a sealed letter written by my father to be opened only after his death. Never opened, it contained a last will and testament written by my father in January of 1961 just before a trip he was to take to California with my mother.
Apprehension before a long trip is common, instinctively connected to the apprehension of our own mortality. As Katherine Mansfield wrote, "Whenever I prepare a journey, I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order."
Just before a long trip is when most people write or revise their wills.
My father was only 38 and the father of seven young children when he wrote the will we just found.
He hadn't traveled much since the war where he was a Flight Officer in the Army Air Force. While recuperating from an illness, he met and, a month or two later, married my mother, an Army Air Force nurse. I came soon after. We moved to Vermont when he began college on the GI Bill. By the time he had finished law school and passed the bar, a fifth baby arrived, little Colleen. At the same time, he also got the highest mark on the civil service entrance exam, a congruence of events that elicited an invitation from Governor Herter to come in and receive his gubernatorial congratulations.
He supported all of us on the salary he received from from his day job at the Massachusetts Board of Conciliation and Arbitration which handled industrial and job disputes. With his new civil service ranking, he was appointed Chairman of the Board.
Only a few years later, he was invited to join the American Academy of Arbitrators and that was the occasion of the trip to California - to attend his first conference and take my mother with him as a sort of vacation, a rare separation from all of us.
So I understand the apprehension he must have felt and the pressing need to write a will, appoint guardians, and record where his accounts and policies were. What I did not expect were his notes "a few words to each child." What came back with resounding force was the importance of his Catholic faith and passing it on. His presence is palpable in what he said and in his handwriting which is as recognizable to me as my own. I imagine his writing this late one night at the kitchen table.
This is what he said:
Jill, you've been a wonderful daughter, your sense of values are superb. Always have God come first, be kind & considerate and charitable & use your wonderful intellect. All my love.
Kevin, you always tried hard to be good and you were never really bad. Work hard and try hard and you'll be a fine man. Your religion is the best gift we have given to you & always cherish it as you have in the past. All my love.
Debby, in many ways the most thoughtful and kindest of all. But exasperatingly thoughtless at other times, we've always loved you deeply Deb and we know you'll rely upon God to direct your life. All my love.
Billy, a good boy, we're blessed with wonderful children and Billy, you've got the makings of a fine man. Enjoy sports with Kevin & Robbie, be true to God & your faith & remember to work hard for a solid goal in life. All my love.
Sweet Colleen, our most affectionate & a good girl, be kind & thoughtful always & do a good, good job in school as Mother and I want you to make us proud. Say your prayers & cherish your faith. All my love.
Dear Robbie, you've been a good boy & always kind to little Julie. Kev & Billy will help you & teach you gams & when you go to school we know you'll work hard. Be a good Catholic boy. All my love.
Dear little Julie, with your imagination & inquisitiveness you'll be a wonderful student. Jill, Debby & Colleen will teach you how to be a good girl. All my love.
I was 15, Kevin 12, Debby 10, Billy 9, Colly 7, Robby 4, Julie almost 3.
We were fortunate to have him around for an additional thirty years so this will and these notes never came to light until now. A gift to all of us, reminding how powerfully and wonderfully we were all loved. A reminder of how heroic raising children can be.
When I first read it, I burst into tears, so moved was I in hearing from him .
Some good advice for those writing their life stories.
The Judgment of Memory by Joseph Bottum
There is some dispute about who coined the description of bad biographies as adding a “new terror to death.” It may have been John Arbuthnot, describing the torrent of miserable, catchpenny books that eighteenth-century publishers issued immediately after the death of anyone famous. Regardless, the phrase ought to have been reserved for the way deceased parents have been treated in the recollections of childhood published over the last decade and a half. Who would risk bringing up literary children, if the reward is those children’s adding this new terror to their parents’ deaths?
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The death of parents leaves their honor in their children’s hands, and the cruel accuracies we might fling in anger against them while they are alive seem even more wrong to use against them once they are gone. “To the living, we owe respect; to the dead, only truth,” Voltaire once opined. It’s a good line: high-minded, confident, sententious in the way only enlightened French philosophes could manage with any aplomb. But it also feels exactly backward, particularly about those we knew and loved. To squabble with our vanished parents about how they lived their lives seems more than a metaphysical nullity. It is, in fact, a moral failing.
If love is true—that is to say, a true thing: a really existing object to which the universe itself must bend—then there remains a place for reticence, and secrets swallowed, and the dead allowed to keep their darkness to themselves.
A new business run by two entrepreneurial moms has popped up to digitally archive your children's drawings reports Springwise.
theART:archives.
How it works? Parents send in their kids’ drawings and theART:archives team professionally photographs each one and sends back a DVD catalogue that can be viewed on a computer screen or TV.
The Library of Congress selects each year the 25 recordings that are "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" to preserve for all time. The 2007 selections for the National Recording Registry were announced this week.
Among the selections are Harry S. Truman’s legendary address to the Democratic National Convention in 1948; a collection of more than 1,000 radio broadcast recordings by Ronald Reagan before his election to the White House; the first trans-Atlantic radio broadcast in 1925; Michael Jackson’s "Thriller," the best-selling album of all time, produced by the legendary Quincy Jones; the "Sounds of Earth" disc that traveled with Voyager through space; Herbie Hancock’s "Headhunters," which expanded his appeal and became a cross-over hit; one of the few gospel recordings performed by Thomas Dorsey; and the first recording of "Call it Stormy Monday, but Tuesday is Just As Bad."
The full list of the 25 selections are below the fold along with their cultural significance.
Which, if any, would you pick for your own personal legacy archives. I'm not sure, but my favorites below are the original cast recording of My Fair Lady, Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison, Tracks of My Tears by Smokey Robinson and the Sounds of the Earth from the disc prepared for the Voyager spacecraft in 1977.
1. The First Trans-Atlantic Broadcast (March 14, 1925)
Representing a technological breakthrough, this early orchestral broadcast originated in London, traveled by land line to station 5XX in Chelmsford, crossed the Atlantic where it was picked up by an RCA transmitter in Maine, and relayed to stations WJZ in New York and WRC in Washington, D.C. Although the fidelity is low, the recording is significant as a documentation of a technical achievement and a very rare instance of an extant example of a complete radio broadcast of the 1920s. The entire 37-minute broadcast survives on discs in the collections of the University of Maryland’s Library of American Broadcasting.
2. "Allons a Lafayette," Joseph Falcon (1928)
"Allons a Lafayette," a lively two-step, was the first commercial recording of traditional Cajun music. Accordionist Joe Falcon and guitarist Cleoma Breaux, his future wife, recorded this song in a New Orleans field session on April 17, 1928, for Columbia Records. Falcon began playing the accordion as a child and soon became a well-known and sought-after dance hall musician, performing throughout Louisiana and other states. His recording career ended soon after Cleoma’s death, but he continued to play and perform with his second wife, Theresa, until his death in 1965.
3. "Casta Diva," from Bellini’s "Norma"; Rosa Ponselle, accompanied by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Giulio Setti. (recorded December 31, 1928 and, January 30, 1929)
The gifted American soprano Rosa Ponselle was known for her brilliant portrayal of Norma, Bellini’s Druid priestess who sacrifices herself on the funeral pyre of her Roman lover. A native of Connecticut, Ponselle made her Metropolitan Opera debut at the age of 21, playing Leonora opposite Enrico Caruso in "La Forza del Destino." Previously, she and her sister Carmela appeared in vaudeville and in New York film theaters. The breadth of range, warmth and beauty of Ponselle’s art represented vocal perfection to many listeners and earned her a long and successful operatic and recording career.
4. "If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again," Thomas A. Dorsey (1934)
The acknowledged father of modern gospel music, Thomas A. Dorsey made only a handful of gospel recordings himself. Recording first as "Georgia Tom" and "Barrelhouse Tom," Dorsey was a noted blues artist and composer during the 1920s and early 1930s. In 1932, he dedicated the remainder of his life exclusively to gospel music. In four sessions in 1932 and 1934, Dorsey recorded several songs for Vocalion, including his popular composition, "If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again," which were released under his own name. His voice, although well-suited to his earlier blues and jazz recordings, was said to have lacked the qualities needed for gospel music and he made no further recordings, concentrating instead on songwriting and publishing. (Thomas Dorsey is not related to big-band leader Tommy Dorsey.)
5. "Sweet Lorraine," Art Tatum (rec. February 22, 1940)
People who listened to an Art Tatum record often wondered if it featured multiple pianists. Tatum's cascading runs up and down the keyboard, the scales, arpeggios, broken bass lines and two-fisted piano choruses, often taken at blistering speeds, gave this impression. Although contemporary critics found his playing "ornate" and devoid of improvisation, Tatum won his spurs as a jazz pianist. "Sweet Lorraine" is one of his signature tunes. Its relaxed tempo allows one to hear and follow all the typical Tatum action, including the harmonies and dissonances that give any Tatum performance undisputed originality.
6. Fibber’s Closet Opens for the First Time, "Fibber McGee and Molly" radio program (March 4, 1940)
The hall closet at 79 Wistful Vista, home of Fibber McGee and Molly (played by Jim and Marion Jordan) was the source of one of radio’s most successful running gags and America’s best-known pile of junk. The effect played on the strength of the sound medium. Frank Pittman, the program’s sound-effects engineer, created the comic catastrophe. The initial click of the door latch tantalizingly opened the routine. Then the thump of several boxes hitting the floor followed and grew to a crescendo of falling bric-a-brac increasing in speed and intensity until the victim was buried under a mountain of pots, pans, fish poles, dumbbells, skates, pie pans and coffee pots. The coda of the avalanche was the tinkling of a little bell. The gag was so effective that crowded, cluttered storage areas in homes are still compared by some to the closet of Fibber McGee.
7. Wings Over Jordan, Wings Over Jordan (1941)
The Wings Over Jordan choir was founded in 1935 by Rev. Glenn T. Settle, pastor of the Gethsemane Baptist Church in Cleveland, Ohio. In 1937, they began appearing on the radio program, "The Negro Hour," singing spirituals and other traditional gospel songs on local station WGAR. By 1938, the choir had become nationally known, broadcasting on CBS. The show, renamed "Wings Over Jordan," featured prominent African-American artists and scholars as well as choir selections. It ran until 1947. Many of these radio programs can be studied and appreciated today because they were pressed as electrical transcriptions and for broadcasts by the Armed Forces Radio Network.
8. Fiorello LaGuardia reading the comics (1945)
Fiorello LaGuardia, the effervescent mayor who is credited with building modern New York City, regularly took to the radio to communicate directly with the citizens of the city. One of LaGuardia’s most recounted acts as mayor was when he read the comics to the children of the city on WNYC radio during the 1945 newspaper delivery strike. He performed animated, dramatic readings, describing the action in the panels, creating different voices and adding excitement with various sound effects. This benevolent image of LaGuardia was immortalized in the opening scene of the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical "Fiorello!" Surviving recordings of LaGuardia reading the comics are held in the WNYC Collection of New York’s Municipal Archives.
9. "Call it Stormy Monday but Tuesday is Just As Bad," T-Bone Walker (1947)
The first recording of this blues standard was made by the Black and White label in Los Angeles on Sept. 14, 1947. Backing up Walker on the session are Lloyd C. Glenn on piano, Bumps Myers on tenor sax and Teddy Buckner playing a muted trumpet. This lineup adds a strong jazz inflection to the recording. The song was reinterpreted with great success by a wide range of blues, rock and jazz recording artists, including Bobby Blue Bland, Lou Rawls, The Allman Brothers and Kenny Burrell.
10. Harry S. Truman speech at the 1948 Democratic National Convention (July 15, 1948)
Prior to the 1948 Democratic Convention, President Truman’s popularity was low and political commentators were sure that Thomas Dewey would easily win the presidential election. One of Truman’s advisors admitted that the president had a "speaking problem" -- he relied too heavily on prepared scripts and his delivery was rushed and occasionally unintelligible. In this speech, Truman worked only from a loose script and, as a result, he found his natural voice. In a down-to-earth and direct manner, which included colloquialisms from his home state of Missouri, the feisty president predicted, "Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make the Republicans like it. Don’t you forget it." The applause lasted for a full two minutes. Defying many predictions, Truman won re-election.
11. "The Jazz Scene," various artists (1949)
At a time when many 78-rpm discs were still sold in plain brown sleeves, producer Norman Granz released this limited-edition album set that included commissioned line drawings by David Stone Martin, large photographs by Gjon Mili and 12 sides of the most innovative jazz of the time. While illustrated album sets were not new at the time, the lavishness of this release was unique. Among the artists represented on the set are Duke Ellington, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Max Roach, Machito and Coleman Hawkins (who plays an unaccompanied tenor sax solo). The presence on the album of Machito’s selection "Tanga" points to the increasing significance of Afro-Cuban jazz in the late 1940s. During that time, Charlie Parker had recorded with Machito and his arranger/trumpeter Mario Bauza. Many other jazz musicians, most notably Dizzy Gillespie, would make important recordings of Afro-Cuban jazz.
12. "It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels," Kitty Wells (recorded May 30, 1952)
An "answer song" to Hank Thompson’s country hit "Wild Side of Life," which criticized a woman who gave up true love for the lure of the honky-tonk, Kitty Wells’s "It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" argues that wayward men are to blame when women stray. Wells’s breakthrough hit established her as a major star and, more importantly, markedly broadened the range of subject matter considered appropriate for female country singers. The recording paved the way for increasingly frank songs by Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette and other female country music stars.
13. "My Fair Lady," original cast recording (1956)
The original cast recording of "My Fair Lady" marks a high point in almost every aspect of the collaborations that produced it. It boasts a magnificent score by lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe—witty, intelligent, beautiful, and romantic. Brilliantly orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett and Philip J. Lang, it captures landmark performances by Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway. The recording itself was wonderfully produced under the supervision of prescient producer Goddard Lieberson, who convinced Columbia to underwrite most of the costs of the original production. Columbia’s initial investment of $360,000 generated tens of millions of dollars in profit. The recording established a new relationship between Broadway productions and record companies; the album’s critical success and popularity with the public were unrivaled at the time.
14. Navajo Shootingway Ceremony Field Recordings, recorded by David McAllester (1957-1958)
Anthropologist David McAllester may have produced the only recordings of the deeply sacred Navajo healing ceremony in Arizona in the late 1950s. McAllester's recordings of Shootingway, one of the most complex in the Navajo ceremonial system, included the nine-day ceremonial event as well as detailed discussions about preparations, procedures, needed sacred paraphernalia, the reciting of all of the prayers, and singing of all of the songs in order. McAllester's collection includes eight different versions of the lengthy Blessingway ceremony, two of the Shootingway, other traditional ceremonies and many examples of contemporary genres in which he was also interested. This collection now resides at Wesleyan University where it became the core of the World Music Archives.
15. "‘Freight Train,’ and Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes," Elizabeth Cotten (1959)
The debut album of singer, songwriter and guitarist Elizabeth Cotten was released when she was over 60 years old. A self-taught guitarist, her expressive two-finger picking style was enormously influential on folk song guitarists. Cotten was a popular performer during the folk music revival of the 1960s and a major inspiration to many aspiring musicians of the time. Cotten, who wrote "Freight Train" at the age of 12, was inspired by living next to the railroad tracks.
16. Marine Band Concert Album to Help Benefit the National Cultural Center (1963)
In 1963 the United States Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force bands and choruses were engaged (by special permission) to make albums of American music which would be sold to help fund the National Cultural Center (later the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts). The Marine Band had just returned from an extensive tour of the U.S. and was in prime form. The resulting recording by Herman Diaz, Jr., the legendary producer for RCA Victor, is considered by many experts as one of the finest recordings in band history because of the incredible sound quality of the recording.
17. "Oh, Pretty Woman," Roy Orbison (1964)
The last of Roy Orbison’s string of hits for Monument records, "Oh, Pretty Woman" was his most enduring recording. Orbison and co-writer Bill Dees tapped out the initial rhythm of the song while sitting at Orbison’s kitchen table. In the recorded version, this became the infectious and well-known opening guitar riff and propulsive drum beat. Artists as varied as Al Green, John Mayall and Van Halen have performed the song, and 2 Live Crew sampled the opening on their 1989 album, "As Clean as They Wanna Be." That appropriation, made without authorization, led to a U. S. Supreme Court case (Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.), which ruled in 1994 that the commercial song parody qualified as fair use under Section 107 of the U. S. copyright law.
18. "Tracks of My Tears," Smokey Robinson and the Miracles (1965)
William "Smokey" Robinson wrote, produced and performed some of the sweetest, most poetic and enduring love songs in rhythm and blues history. "Tracks of My Tears" is highlighted by Robinson’s velvety high tenor voice and his heartbreaking lyrics. It captures the peak of Robinson’s talent. His smooth voice conveys the passion and pain required to maintain a false, happy exterior after a romantic breakup. He heightens the effect when he sweeps into his remarkable falsetto. The recording won numerous awards and is considered to be among the best recordings by the Miracles. "Tracks of My Tears" further emphasized the influence of Detroit soul on American popular music, a position attained by the recordings produced by Motown Records.
19. "You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song," Ella Jenkins (1966)
Performer and educator Ella Jenkins has been leading children on musical journeys around the world for more than 50 years. Her call-and-response songs, and gentle soothing voice, encourage children to join in and sing along, overcoming any shyness or reluctance they might have. Singing with Ella, children have learned songs from a variety of cultures and in many languages. Her vast repertoire of songs includes nursery rhymes, folk songs and chants as well as her own original songs. In keeping with the policy of its record label, Folkways, "You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song" has remained in print since it was first published in 1966.
20. "Music from the Morning of the World," various artists; recorded by David Lewiston (1966)
The first recording in the celebrated Nonesuch Explorer Series, "Music from the Morning of the World" was one of the first attempts to offer "international music" and, in particular, ethnic field recordings as entertainment for commercial recording listeners. The series exposed listeners to new musical idioms and non-Western classical music, and set high standards for recording quality and accompanying written documentation. "Music from the Morning of the World" provided many listeners with their first exposure to Balinese gamelan music and the unforgettably compelling "monkey chant."
21. "For the Roses," Joni Mitchell (1972)
In "For the Roses," Joni Mitchell took the confessional lyrics of her critically-acclaimed "Blue" album and infused them with touches of jazz. The result is a mélange of folk, rock, jazz and country that retains the heartfelt tone of her earlier work, but presents it on a broader canvas. While Mitchell later delved more deeply into jazz, "For the Roses" remains the album in which all the elements of her creative palette are in perfect balance.
22. "Headhunters," Herbie Hancock (1973)
"Headhunters" is a pivotal work of Herbie Hancock’s career. It was his first true fusion recording. Possessing all the sensibilities of jazz, but with R&B and funk soul rhythms, "Headhunters" had a mass appeal that made it the greatest-selling jazz album in history at the time of its release. The recording is notable for its use of an extremely wide range of instruments, including electric synthesizers which brought that new instrument to the forefront of jazz for the first time. Hancock’s experiments caused controversy among jazz purists, many of whom at the time belittled it as "pop." "Headhunters" proved to be influential not only to jazz, but also to funk, soul and hip-hop.
23. Ronald Reagan Radio Broadcasts (1976-1979)
This collection of over 1,000 radio broadcast recordings, the majority penned by Ronald Reagan himself, documents the development of his political vision in the years immediately preceding his election to the White House. In the broadcasts Reagan sounded what would become the familiar themes of his presidency: reduction of government spending, tax cuts, supply-side economics and anti-communism. These radio "chats" did not focus on specific policy prescriptions, as much as outlining a conservative governing philosophy, much of which remains with the Republican Party to this day. Also showcased is Reagan’s conversational, folksy rhetorical style, which added measurably to his public appeal.
24. "The Sounds of Earth," disc prepared for the Voyager spacecraft (1977)
Never released to the public, this disc was prepared to introduce aurally our planet to any alien intelligence that might encounter the Voyager spacecraft many millions of years in the future. The disc contains encoded photographs, spoken messages, music and sounds. There are greetings delivered from around the world in 55 languages. The sound essay includes life sounds (EEGs and EKGs), birds, elephants, whales, volcanoes, rain and a baby. The 90 minutes of music features selections from ragas, Navajo Indian chants, Java court gamelan, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2, a Peruvian Woman’s Wedding song, and Chuck Berry’s "Johnny B. Goode."
25. "Thriller," Michael Jackson (1982)
Michael Jackson’s second album with legendary producer Quincy Jones attained stratospheric national and international success. Featuring outstanding performances by Paul McCartney on "The Girl is Mine" and a metallic Eddie Van Halen guitar lead on "Beat It," the album’s influence on the record industry and subsequent popular music is immeasurable. The album also includes the strong disco-inflected "Billie Jean" and the compelling title track "Thriller," featuring an eerie voice-over by Vincent Price. Jackson’s keen pop sensibilities, performances by a wide range of talented musicians and Quincy Jones’ expert production all contributed to making "Thriller" the best-selling album of all time.
After the extraordinary reception to the Beloved Professor Delivering His Last Lecture Jeffrey Zaslow teamed up with Randy Pausch to co-write the new book,
"The Last Lecture" (Randy Pausch, Jeffrey Zaslow)
Zaslow reports that Pausch is finding more difficult to say goodbye to his family than he did to his colleagues at work.
Zaslow asks "When death is near, how do we show our love?" in A Final Farwell
For many of us, his lecture has become a reminder that our own futures are similarly -- if not as drastically -- brief. His fate is ours, sped up.
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People wrote about how his lecture had inspired them to spend more time with loved ones, to quit pitying themselves, or even to shake off suicidal urges. Terminally ill people said the lecture had persuaded them to embrace their own goodbyes, and as Randy said, "to keep having fun every day I have left, because there's no other way to play it."
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Years ago, Jai had suggested that Randy compile his advice into a book for her and the kids. She wanted to call it "The Manual." Now, in the wake of the lecture, others were also telling Randy that he had a book in him--
"Well, you also need emotional insurance," the minister explained. The premiums for that insurance would be paid for with Randy's time, not his money. The minister suggested that Randy spend hours making videotapes of himself with the kids. Years from now, they will be able to see how easily they touched each other and laughed together.
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Randy also made a point of talking to people who lost parents when they were very young. They told him they found it consoling to learn about how much their mothers and fathers loved them. The more they knew, the more they could still feel that love. To that end, Randy built separate lists of his memories of each child. He also has written down his advice for them, things like: "If I could only give three words of advice, they would be, 'Tell the truth.' If I got three more words, I'd add, 'All the time.' "
The advice he's leaving for Chloe includes this: "When men are romantically interested in you, it's really simple. Just ignore everything they say and only pay attention to what they do." Chloe, not yet 2 years old, may end up having no memory of her father. "But I want her to grow up knowing," Randy said, "that I was the first man ever to fall in love with her."
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As he later explained it: "I am maintaining my clear-eyed sense of the inevitable. I'm living like I'm dying. But at the same time, I'm very much living like I'm still living."
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And so despite all his goodbyes, he has found solace in the idea that he'll remain a presence. "Kids, more than anything else, need to know their parents love them," he said. "Their parents don't have to be alive for that to happen."
The Last Lecture website.
Cross-posted at Business of Life
On Marketplace radio yesterday, reporter Curt Nickish has an interesting piece about online obituaries called Another nail in newspapers' coffin about a new site now in beta called Tributes where people can place online obituaries, "keeping the memories alive".
When Jeff Taylor who started Monster.com, he moved help wanted ads from newspapers to the web.
Now he's trying to do the same thing with obituaries after not doing so well with Eons, a website targeted to those over 50.
In browsing through the obit section on Eons, looking for someone to interview, he came across the obituary I had posted about my mother with links to the three blog posts I had done about her.
That is how I came to be interviewed and how my mother's photo is now posted on Marketplace radio. Interestingly it nothing to do with the work I'm doing or the book I'm writing.
You can hear my lovely voice, part of the interview here.
Only on the market for a year, the Flip camcorder has already garnered 13% of the market. David Pogue finally reviews it, Camcorder Brings Zen to the Shoot.
the Flip has been reduced to the purest essence of video capture. You turn it on, and it’s ready to start filming in two seconds. You press the red button once to record (press hard — it’s a little balky) and once to stop. You press Play to review the video, and the Trash button to delete a clip.
There it is: the entire user’s manual.
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Having finally lived with the Flip, I finally know the answer: it’s a blast. It’s always ready, always with you, always trustworthy. Instead of crippling this “camcorder,” the simplicity elevates it. Comparisons with a real camcorder are nonsensical, because the Flip is something else altogether: it’s the video equivalent of a Kodak point-and-shoot camera. It’s the very definition of “less is more.”
"Flip Video Camcorder: 60-Minutes (Black)" (Pure Digital Technologies, Inc.)
$150-$180
Photo from an exhibit at the Newark Museum by Frank Maresca of found snapshots taken between the 1920s and 1960s.
Asked to discuss the immediacy and urgency of snapshots, he says: “When people look at snapshots, whether of their own making or those made by others, the effect is so powerful that the viewer feels as if they are having an out-of-body and out-of-time experience. You see it happen all the time. The snapshot just may be Everyman’s eternity.”
Making Sense of Other People's Memories
Reliving the past that is the most fantastic adventure of all. The event, relived, grows more and more enigmatic, and richer and richer in meaning. Turning to the past, I reach the future, I recall people I never knew.
From a review by David Marcus of the new book, A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life by George Konrad.
At the end of the memoir, Konrád asks, “Where is home?” we know the answer. Memory is home.
"A Guest in My Own Country: A Hungarian Life" (George Konrad)
What people want is some memorial to the significance of their lives. When a group of high school students led by an inspired teacher set up a poetry stand for poetry on demand, the results are heart-warming.
Poetry Stand
There’s a Japanese film I love called After Life. In the movie, people who have recently died reside for a week in an institutional building, where they must choose one moment from their lives in which to dwell for eternity. The hard-working staff of the afterlife must then create a short film of each person’s moment, which the newly dead view at the end of the week, before departing. What I love most is how unpolished these films are — the budget is low, the production time is short, and the staff members are not really filmmakers — and yet how effectively they do the job of evoking the joy people associate with their chosen memories. One man’s happiest moment comes while riding in a plane. In his film, the clouds are obviously fabric dangling from fat strings beside the windowless fuselage. But it works — it triggers the memory for the man, who sheds tears of joy as he heads into eternity.
I think those 13 teenagers were doing something similar at the poetry stand that afternoon in Princeton: dutifully listening to their customers, noting specifics, and trying their best to fashion a poem to memorialize a part of a life. I wish you could have seen a middle-aged woman who had recently lost her son asking Haley for something to comfort her widowed daughter-in-law. How hard Haley worked on that poem while the woman stood waiting.
In five years a quarter of the entertainment being produced will be "circular" according to a study by Nokia. It will be created, shared and edited within peer groups. The audience becomes immersed and the creative experience participatory.
says Mother Pie in a terrific post American Cultural Soup followed by another on the new American "immersive and recursive" creative style, with its roots in geek culture and its digital tools.
We record and share, "stretching our moments by making them part of the present, future and past," our lives and works ever open to editing, reiteration, recycling and mashups.
More of us are becoming creative and discovering the joy of "immersive participatory creation", creative play in the digital world whether we're home alone or collaborating with family members.
That collaboration does even have to take place in your own life time.
Think of how Natalie Cole mixed her own voice with her father's when to sing his top song in her album Unforgettable. That 'collaboration' duet took place 25 years after he died.
"Unforgettable: With Love" (Natalie Cole)
She won seven Grammy awards in 1992 for the album and the song.
Kevin Kelly's blog Cool Tools is a favorite of mine because I'm always finding good information about products and services that make life easier.
He's found a service that can scan your old photos and slides cheaply called Scancafe.
I wrote a much longer post with excerpts and photos but for some reason I'm unable to post it despite several tries over the past week
I have a big crate of old slides and photo albums just waiting to be scanned. So far, I've taken a number of slides to my neighborhood camera store for a specific project and been pleased with the results.
So until my next big project, I'm going to hold off, but I'd be interested in the experience of anyone who uses them.
When the demolition guys found an old suitcase, tucked into a crawl space, they opened it up to find photo albums, a yearbook, a college paper or two, and several photos. For some reason, they kept it though they didn't know who it belonged to until, a year later, Dan Barnett started googling and calling.
Lost and found, a lifetime of memories
And there they were, those construction workers in their heavy boots, those guys with scarred hands who tear down and rip out, respectfully watching the white-haired lawyer.
Shaughnessy's father died in 1985, and his mother died two years later.
Now, two decades after their deaths, he was staring silently at their unearthed pictures, confronting memories of his past.
Ronni Bennett writes that blogging gives shape to our lives.
My great Aunt Edith and I exchanged weekly letters for 25 years. She was my favorite, most trusted older relative and I poured out my heart to her about every good and bad thing that happened to me from age 15 on.
Visiting her one time when I was about 40, she announced that I was “old enough now for these” as she handed me a box with every letter I’d written her through all those years – essentially my own biography in my own hand and the most precious gift she ever gave me.
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Although it is an imperative for elders, making sense of ourselves and giving shape to our lives is what writing has always been about at any age. Blogging gives that need a new dimension through the medium itself and the sharing of our thoughts with so many others than personal letters allow.
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I think bloggers – old and young – intuitively know this, and that our blogs are on the bleeding edge of a renaissance in personal writing. Our blogs (and saved emails) will become as important to our loved ones as be-ribboned letters were in the past.
YouTube is becoming a terrific resource for those who are using multimedia to tell the stories of their lives.
Take the Original Mickey Mouse Club TV introduction for example. Watching it, I can remember the excitement I felt as a little girl. I was so enamored of the Club and the Mousekeeters, Doreen and Annette being my favorites, that my best friend Kathy and I practiced routines in the back yard so that we would be ready for the talent scouts we were sure were coming to our hometown.
Joan Didion wrote, "We tell stories in order to live." We all tell stories. It is how we storytellers make sense of our lives and what's happened to us.
Stories are the best way to keep memories alive as Patty Digh knows and writes in Remember Daddy
Besides the loss, obvious though that is to any of us who have suffered the death of someone we love, the worse thing about someone so important dying is the very idea - the very chilling incomprehensible thought - that people will forget them.
By telling his stories, and passing them along to Emma and Tess - and to you - he lives on. That's my job. It is all we have besides small luggage tags with his handwriting, photographs, a red corduroy shirt, his Mickey Mouse watch. Let's pass stories along, shall we?
That's what Sally Jacobs, The Practical Archivist, calls photographs trapped inside those sticky magnetic photo albums that used to be so popular.
Acidic cardboard covered in stripes of acidic glue on the back, smothered in a vinyl sheet that is so chemically volatile it stinks. Oy. Fortunately, this is one of the few hands-on conservation projects that's easy enough for non-experts to tackle successfully
Some other tips from Sally Jacobs in preserving one of a kind family photographs
1. You can't keep it all. Be your own editor. Don't be afraid to lose the dreck.
2. If it's worth keeping, it's worth treating right
3. The shortest pencil is better than the longest memory
4. Digital is more fragile than you think, "Scan your prints and print your digitals".
From eclexys via The Practical Archivist
I would have loved to read my grandparents’ blogs, seen their photostreams, watched their videoblogs one by one. Beautiful anachronism, and wonderful to experience people whose genes you share, who live in another time that, in some ways, feels more like another place.
To hell with posterity. I love imagining even just one of my grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, or farther-off descendants, reading my blog and this long-ago person snapping into clearer, bizarrely intimate focus.
We’ve leaving voices to echo through time. That is, if bitrot doesn’t set in first. And that, to me, makes blogging somewhat less strange, and somewhat more beautiful.
The young and the old have the most free time to spend on the Internet, the young because they have no responsibilities, the old because their responsibilities are over.
I find it a very encouraging sign that more and more seniors are turning to the Internet to preserve their legacies, usually in written form, sometimes orally, often on blogs.
With the spectacular success of YouTube, more seniors are preserving what they know in video form. Take Paul Gordon, 92, who wanted to show off the piano he made or Bayle "Bubbe" Shere who has recipes she wants to share. Then, of course, there's Millie who's been blogging and videoblogging for years now at My Mom's Blog thanks to her son Steve Garfield.
Seniors 65 are the fastest growing segment of people going online probably because everyone else is already there. 39% of all seniors have internet access and once they learn how easy the taping and uploading is, watch out.
Since I putting together a book of my mother's favorite recipes complete with photos of her, the dishes and some of the handwritten recipe cards, this article by Ellen Claire Girardaeu stood out.
I can make a fine beef and vegetable soup because Mother wrote out the recipe in minute detail for me, and I can read.
The Perfect Recipe for Warm Memories
The handwritten ones are especially dear to me. They conjure the presence of the people who wrote them. Sharon's oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, Bobbye Raye's "petticoat tails" (which I think is just a cute name for shortbread, but the recipe works, while most shortbread recipes don't), Joan's nuclear black bean salad -- all are in the book. But Mother's soup has pride of place.
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It is hard to explain exactly how much finding Mother's soup recipe meant to me. Seeing her writing, reading the funny little asides that wouldn't make sense to anyone else and don't make much sense even to me, is like having her standing before me. Maybe the touch of her hand still warms the paper a tiny bit. All I know is that the recipe brings my mother to life for a moment, and that is enough.
From Springwise, a great new idea.
Voice Quilt combines high-tech and high touch to make it easy for people to create highly personal audio gifts for friends and family.
The process is simple. Customers set up an account at voicequilt.com. They purchase phone time and issue an invitation to friends and family, providing them with the toll-free phone number they need to call to record their message. Phone time costs from USD 9.95 for a MiniQuilt (3-5 Messages, ½ hr), to USD 34.95 for a Community Quilt (40-50 Messages, 3 hrs). The customer then listens to the recordings and creates a playlist. Once the playlist has been finalized, the Voice Quilt is shipped to the recipient on a CD (USD 11.95), inside a wooden keepsake box (USD 79.95 – 139.95), or downloaded from the internet (no extra cost).
Founder Hope Flammer came up with the idea after her best friend’s husband became ill and lapsed into a coma. She accompanied her friend to the hospital every day to visit with him, speaking, laughing and playing his favourite music as if he were awake and participating in the conversation with them. Fortunately he recovered. “I came away from that experienced convinced that loving voices can make a difference,” Hope says. “Preserved for years to come, the greetings and memories of close friends can remind us of special times. A family story, a child's laughter, a best friend's quirky expressions... these are sounds that nurture the spirit.”
Voice Quilt’s strength lies in its simplicity. One person arranges everything online, and the others just dial in whenever it suits them: it's as easy as leaving voice mail. One to set up locally!
VoiceQuilt Check it out.
The body of Julia Campbell, 40, a Peace Corps volunteer, was found in a shallow grave in a remote area of the Philippines.
Soldiers uncovered her body close to the village after a 10-day search. Her feet were protruding from the soil.
"Theory is she was killed," Beth Cedo, a spokeswoman for the police, said in a mobile phone text message.
No kidding.
Fortunately for her family, her friends and those who want to read about a woman who left all behind for a time to help others, she left a weblog, Julia in the Philippines.
Those who knew her and loved her can learn more about her life and what she thought and draw closer to her even as they mourn her loss.
R.I.P.
Roger Scruton writes Why I became a conservative
Rightly understood, he argued, society is a partnership among the dead, the living, and the unborn, and without what he called the “hereditary principle,” according to which rights could be inherited as well as acquired, both the dead and the unborn would be disenfranchized. Indeed, respect for the dead was, in Burke’s view, the only real safeguard that the unborn could obtain, in a world that gave all its privileges to the living. His preferred vision of society was not as a contract, in fact, but as a trust, with the living members as trustees of an inheritance that they must strive to enhance and pass on.
He travels to Prague in 1975
Perhaps the most fascinating and terrifying aspect of Communism was its ability to banish truth from human affairs, and to force whole populations to “live within the lie,” as President Havel put it.
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To me it was the greatest revelation, when first I travelled to Czechoslovakia in 1979, to come face to face with a situation in which people could, at any moment, be removed from the book of history, in which truth could not be uttered, and in which the Party could decide from day to day not only what would happen tomorrow, but also what had happened today, what had happened yesterday, and what had happened before its leaders had been born.
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the dissidents were acutely conscious of the value of memory. Their lives were an exercise in what Plato calls anamnesis: the bringing to consciousness of forgotten things.
From by Roger Scruton
In My Mother's Small House Are Mansions of Memory
In her 92nd year, my mother's happenstance collages of her life are steadily growing both richer and deeper....a jumble of clips, slogans, photos, handicrafts and images. Aside from its complexity, it wouldn't mean all that much to you. These icons of other people's private lives never do.
It's unlikely you have a 92-year-old tennis-playing mother like Gerard does, but likely you have people in your family who have their own collages. Ask them about their collection of stuff. You may learn something very interesting about how they think.
If you want to plan a family reunion, Sue Shellenberger in the Wall Street Journal suggests you make a long-term plan, a year or 18 months out. That way, people can organize their over-stuffed calendars around the event.
Reunions Magazine has a website with helpful tips and resources.
You can even set up your own reunion website at myevent.com.
Be prepared though for infection. When far flung and extended families get together for reunions, members often catch the contagious genealogy bug, symptoms of which include
The genealogy bug is not fatal, though it may last a lifetime. Some call it a 'grave' disease.
Organizing family history material can be daunting, especially when several people and families are involved. A website is just too clunky. Blogs work the best.
Bill Ives, a former academic psychologist, became an independent consultant, an expert on knowledge management when he began blogging, the love of which set him on a path to Web 2.0 that included business blogging, blog coaching and pod consulting with plenty of time left over for restaurant blogging.
Now he has taken his experience and expertise to begin two family blogs. Check out how he expands his family's history on both sides via blogs.
Ives Family History Blog
Sharpe Family in NC
Each post is a little history lesson on an ancestor, an essay or a photo or illustration. Because blogs offer the ability to add tags and categories, they are a wonderfully cheap content management tool where you can find what you're looking for quickly through an embedded search tool or through a category search. By publishing on the web, Bill has opened up his research to other family members and those who find him while researching their own family histories.
Using technology, he's expanded his resources and his reach, now and in the future. Or as one wag said, "genealogy is collecting dead relatives and an occasional live cousin."
Slate is having a memoir week about people who have written and published memoirs. They asked a group of memoir writers whether or not they alerted family members and friends that they were writing about them.
Usually published memoirs incorporate imaginative renderings to flesh out characters and conversations, so how family and friends reacted becomes quite interesting. Those of you who are beginning to write your own memoir, not for publication, but for yourself and your family, will want to take a look.
Daneille Trussoni wrote a memoir about her relationship with her father who was a tunnel rat in Vietnam while she was living in Sofia, Bulgaria, after extensive research but had few conversations with family members or her father after he developed throat cancer
Sean Wilsey wrote
The way most memoirists have handled still-living people has been to outlive them and then publish. Or publish, then flee.
Yet Wilsey interviewed just about everyone he could think of to write about his mother who when she read the manuscript felt betrayed but was big enough to say
Sean, it's such an accurate portrait of so many people that I know that I've had to conclude it must be an accurate portrait of me, too. And so I'm really going to have to take a look at the fact that I come across that way."
His stepmother hired a lawyer and threatened to sue.
John Dickerson wrote about his mother Nancy Dickerson
The book I wanted to write was about a journey from an angry kid to the adult who came to love this amazing woman.
Watching old film he found himself
rooting for her as if she were the child and I the parent.
When Frank McCourt wrote Angela's Ashes
I was denounced from hill, pulpit, and barstool. Certain citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother's name, and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost.
It's easier to digitize your old photos than ever before.
First there were scanners and the price was right, about $100-$150.
Still scanning hundreds can be tedious. If you have thousands, it's just too much.
Now there are services to do all that scanning for you. You can mail them away, but who's really comfortable sending all their precious family photos to the mail, or even FedEx
Now, your neighborhood camera store can digitize 500 photos for about $50 thanks to new high end scanners from Kodak.
A Lifetime of Photos on a Single Disc
New Services Cheaply, Quickly Digitize Troves of Snapshots; Throwing Away the Shoebox
The Griot Project is set to record 2000 oral stories from black families
StoryCorps and the National Museum of African American History and Culture yesterday announced a collaboration to record stories of African Americans.
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The new initiative is called the StoryCorps Griot project. Over the next year the organizers plan to collect nearly 2,000 stories, principally from World War II veterans and those who were part of the civil rights movement. It is believed to be the largest effort to collect oral histories from African Americans since the Federal Writers' Project in the 1930s.
StoryCorps is a simple idea. The person talks about life's questions," said Dave Isay, who started the national oral history effort in 2003. In New York, StoryCorps has set up story booths in Grand Central Terminal and at the World Trade Center site where visitors can tell their own recollections of events, people and their families. "Our stories, the stories of ordinary people are just as important as Paris Hilton and other stories the media feeds us," Isay said.
When are you going to do your stories?
Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post has some handy rules for YouTube videos that you should keep in mind when you make videos for your legacy archives.
Rules for YouTube: Make Art, Not Bore
Mean it
Your limitations are your strengths
Indulge the arcane
Resist facile irony
Take us to another world
Be a star
You made us laugh, you've made us link, now make us think.
Brevity and wit should never trump soul.
See what happens when you don't write down where you put something for safekeeping and keep a backup copy.
NASA can't find the original tapes of Neil Armstrong on the Moon.
The original ones were much sharper and more detailed than the blurry ones we are familiar with.
Wouldn't all of us love to have a journal, a memoir, a letter, from those we have loved and lost? Shouldn't all of us leave a bit of that behind?
Anna Qundlen in Write For Your Life.
in the age of the telephone most communication became evanescent, gone into thin air no matter how important or heartfelt. Think of all those people inside the World Trade Center saying goodbye by phone. If only, in the blizzard of paper that followed the collapse of the buildings, a letter had fallen from the sky for every family member and friend, something to hold on to, something to read and reread. Something real. Words on paper confer a kind of immortality.
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That's also what writing is: not just a legacy, but therapy. As the novelist Don DeLillo once said, "Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals."
Each of us would do well the cultivate an awareness of the death so as to do those necessary things to make the future lives of our children and easier and to live our lives more fully and gratefully. While we should do this, not enough of us do.
The people who do so on a regular basis are those men and women in our military service..
Here's what J.B. Smith wrote, A Soldier's Thoughts
I went to Iraq prepared to die. A former soldier called out of the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR), I was a supporter of the war and ready and willing to do my part. I got into decent physical shape, signed my medical waivers, and volunteered for the job of training Iraqi Troops and taking them into combat. I had no illusions as to the potential price I, or my wife and 2-year-old daughter might have to pay. I made my burial wishes known and wrote about 50 letters to my daughter, dated and spaced to guide her through the challenges which I knew would come in life. I made peace with the plausibility of my death, content in my knowledge that our mission was critical for the ultimate stability of the world and the best course available for American security.
When my daughter was 26, she would finally receive the letter explaining my attitudes towards the war and how I felt about my death. This is the phrase which I believe best captured it:
"In order to secure the American people, democracy had to be spread to the region because democratic governments are far less prone to going to war and they are far less prone to internal strife and violence. The process couldn't help but be messy, but it was necessary. Obviously, I don't know how this experiment works out, but you do. If Iraq is a democratic nation now, or if Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi, Kuwait, or one of the others has become democratic, then the war was worth it. However, if we pulled out because we lost too many soldiers and got out in an act of political expediency, then I did die in vain."
Share Grandma's Birthday with Music and Animation
Unlike many other photo-sharing services, Smilebox does not require users to upload photos to the Web site and edit them there. Rather, since users download the template, they need only drag images to the desired locations on the template, then upload the entire file to the Web site. Smilebox then delivers e-mail messages to the user’s friends and family, inviting them to view the book.
Check it out Smilebox
You really realize how important keeping a personal legacy archive is when you read about First Sgt. Charles King who kept a journal for his baby son Jordan when he first deployed to Iraq.
This drawing he did will be how his son imagines him.
For his son Jordan, these words his father took time to write down will be how he will come to know his father who was killed by an ICD.
His fiance Dana Canedy writes "From Father to Son, Last Words to Live By".
On paper, Charles revealed himself in a way he rarely did in person. He thought hard about what to say to a son who would have no memory of him. Even if Jordan will never hear the cadence of his father’s voice, he will know the wisdom of his words.
Never be ashamed to cry. No man is too good to get on his knee and humble himself to God. Follow your heart and look for the strength of a woman.
Charles tried to anticipate questions in the years to come. Favorite team? I am a diehard Cleveland Browns fan. Favorite meal? Chicken, fried or baked, candied yams, collard greens and cornbread. Childhood chores? Shoveling snow and cutting grass. First kiss? Eighth grade.
In neat block letters, he wrote about faith and failure, heartache and hope. He offered tips on how to behave on a date and where to hide money on vacation. Rainy days have their pleasures, he noted: Every now and then you get lucky and catch a rainbow.
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Toward women, he displayed an old-fashioned chivalry, something he expected of our son. Remember who taught you to speak, to walk and to be a gentleman, he wrote to Jordan in his journal. These are your first teachers, my little prince. Protect them, embrace them and always treat them like a queen.
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The 18th was a long, solemn night, he wrote in Jordan’s journal. We had a memorial for two soldiers who were killed by an improvised explosive device. None of my soldiers went to the memorial. Their excuse was that they didn’t want to go because it was depressing. I told them it was selfish of them not to pay their respects to two men who were selfless in giving their lives for their country.
Things may not always be easy or pleasant for you, that’s life, but always pay your respects for the way people lived and what they stood for. It’s the honorable thing to do.
When Jordan is old enough to ask how his father died, I will tell him of Charles’s courage and assure him of Charles’s love. And I will try to comfort him with his father’s words.
God blessed me above all I could imagine, Charles wrote in the journal. I have no regrets, serving your country is great.
He tucked a message for Dana in the front of the journal.
This is the letter every soldier should write, he said. For us, life will move on through Jordan. He will be an extension of us and hopefully everything that we stand for. ... I would like to see him grow up to be a man, but only God knows what the future holds.
Beverly Beckham writes
My oldest daughter turned 35 last week and what she wanted most for her birthday was to remember turning 21. "I was in college. I must have gone out. Where did I go? What did I do?"
We sat around the table, family and friends, trying to remember something of her 21st birthday. But none of us could.
You think you don't forget the big moments: birthdays, holidays, milestones. But they slip away, too, like thousands of small moments lived and celebrated, and then forgotten.
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When my daughter turned 21, I didn't write about it, and she didn't write about it, or paste a coaster in a book or preserve it in any way.
And so it came, it went, and it's gone.
Most days are. We live thousands of them and recall just a few. Pictures capture some. And words. And song.
Even better is blogging. A few minutes can capture a day in words and photos. I call it legacy blogging for yourself and your family and friends. Blogging captures the evanescence of your life. Blogging enriches your life.
I can't think of a better way to capture the highlights of your life as they happen, an adjunct to your memory. In later years, when you look back to what you wrote, you will see how far you've come and how much is gone, except for what you wrote and saved. What you've blogged becomes what you rediscover. Blogging also helps slow life down.
For those who want to blog, but who don't want the whole world to know what they writing and thinking, use a password protected blogging service. Or consider Vox.
Vox is the new blogging service from Six Apart that brought us Moveable Type and Typepad,
Vox is private. You control who sees your blog by setting privacy filters, allowing only friends or family say. Even better, you can share video and audio, even import media from YouTube, Flickr, or Photobucket. For the time being, Vox is free.
For those of you who want to begin creating your personal legacy archives, but who, for one reason or another, balk at the idea of writing your life story consider easing into it with Things You Don't Know About Me.
Jeremy of Lifestylism has tagged me with the current meme which, unlike most memes, I like and so to his challenge, Five Things You Didn't Know About Me, I reply.
1. When I began working at the Department of Interior, as the Special Assistant to the Solicitor, I wrote a number of speeches for the Solicitor, one of which became infamous, picked up by the Associated Press across the country and, in the end, selected by Parade magazine in its year-end round-up as the best or funniest environmental stories of the year, I can't remember which.
Let's face it, it's hard to find something interesting and relevant to write about for the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association, - that's cattlemen to you. So, when in the course of reading reports from the EPA, and the International Climate Change Committee, I came across the fact that grants were being awarded to study cow flatulence and digestion as one of the major sources of methane contributing to climate change, I knew I had a winner. "Windy cows" it was. The speech wrote itself and the cattlemen loved it.
2. I can't tell the difference between cars with the exception of PT Cruisers and sometimes Volkswagens. My first real boyfriend was unduly proud of his red Alfa Romeo so when walking ahead of him one day, I climbed into a red volkswagen thinking it was his, I broke his heart.
3. When in college, I was strapped for cash. I had the brilliant idea of starting a chain letter with myself at the top so people would send me money. Within hours, I was called into the Dean's Office to be told why this was not a good idea.
4. I began working at 16, two hours a day at a local bakery where I worked behind the counter, slicing bread and wrapping up pastries for customers. At 16, I was old enough to go to Revere Beach with friends from school, taking first a bus, then a subway, then a transfer to another line, before we reached Revere Beach with its boardwalk, amusement park and beach. It was a long, hot trek so we didn't do it very often. Now this was the time the Boston Strangler was at large, but we had our defenses - a hatpin we would wear under our collars, so we could poke him the eye.
On one such outing to Revere, I had to leave early to go to work. I was fine, I thought until I noticed a man with a creepy smile who seemed to be following me as I walked alone to the subway. He followed me when I switched lines, then followed me on the bus, then followed me, trying to talk to me as I walked to the bakery. By that time I was really scared and hid in the bakery's basement because I didn't want to see him again. The ladies who worked with me were very nice and one walked me home. I told my mother who was leaving with my father that night for a weekend on Nantucket, the first vacation they had ever taken away from me and my six brothers and sisters. The babysitter for the weekend was one of the eight Callahan girls, just up the street, so no worry about a back-up. My parents were very concerned of course and debated whether they should go or not. Finally, they called the police and explained the situation. The police promised to keep us on cruiser watch for the weekend and every half hour, a police car would pass our house very slowly. Despite the high excitement, nothing happened.
It was years before they captured the Boston Strangler, Albert de Salvo. When I saw his picture in the paper, I recognized him immediately. He was the man with the creepy smile who followed me home that day from Revere Beach. My brother Robby doesn't believe this story.
5. After I graduated from law school and passed the New York Bar, my first job was with a very large Wall St firm whose flag was, I kid you not, completely beige. It was one of the most boring jobs I ever had and I didn't last more than a year. Way before computers revolutionized legal research, we "shephardized" our research using pencils, wearing them down so quickly the firm had a man whose job it was to go from office to office every afternoon just sharpening all our pencils. Since I worked on only two cases for the managing partner, one of which had been on appeal for over 20 years in the U.S. Court of Claims with hundreds of millions of dollars pending on whether deferred but uncollected insurance premiums had to be included in income. I did research on one arcane point after another but would get so bored, I would start to fall asleep with a type of brain fog that no amount of coffee could clear. To stay awake, I would go to the ladies' room and read a short story in the New Yorker. Soon, I was carrying collections of short stories every day, parceling them out, one every hour or two. I read more short stories in that one very long year than I ever had before or ever would again.
I now tag 5 women about whom I'd love to learn more.
Patti
Rhea
Theresa
Evelyn
Nellie
UPDATE: Since David Bowles of Westward Sagas tagged me with the same meme, I am simply going to repost this because he especially will appreciate the windy cow story much as I enjoyed learning how much ranching is in his heart, even though he had to finally sell his family's ranch.
If you are hesitating to record your parents or your family history, listen to what Susan Kitchen's boyfriend told her after his mother died and two years after Susan recorded what his mother had to say about her life.
Maria Brown Fogelman writes in the Washington Post, Dear Dad: I'll Be Hearing You. How her project to record some of her father's memories of World War II was a "process that moved our relationship, like a time-travel vehicle, to a completely different dimension."
Standing next to his bed, I think about how the preservation of memory has shaped our relationship. Throughout my childhood, Dad regaled me with stories of his stint in the Navy during World War II. The effect was so strong that I chose "The Caine Mutiny" by Herman Wouk as one of my favorite eighth-grade reads along with teen-romance novels by Betty Cavanna.
But it wasn't until more than four decades later that I decided to preserve his wartime memories in a more concrete way.
"I'd like to tape you," I had told him, explaining that this would be an "official" interview: I would be armed with a packet of questions from the Library of Congress's Veterans History Project.
On the drive from my home in Silver Spring to my parents' home in Wilmington, however, I started to worry that my father's initial receptiveness might dissolve into reticence or, even worse, the inability to take the whole idea seriously. Even as a 50-plus-year-old adult, I was still afraid of feeling like the little girl who would cry loudly and pitifully whenever her father teased her.
But as soon as I arrived, my parents welcomed me with stacks of photo albums, V-mail -- letters written on a special form that would be microfilmed to save shipping space, then enlarged at an overseas destination before delivery as a facsimile -- and a copy of a discharge document from the Navy Personnel Separation Center in Bainbridge, Md., for my father, Louis Brown.
While he signed the release form for the Library of Congress project, I set up the tape recorder.
"Just wait," I teased him, "you're going to be featured in a Smithsonian exhibit."
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In the ICU just nine months later, I think about how fortuitous it was that my father and I embarked on the oral history project. In all, I made three trips and filled three 90-minute tapes with his recollections of the war years.
Digital Growth Charts from Mother Pie collects examples of human time lines, photographs taken daily or yearly assembled into short videos. Like the time lapse videos of flowers, only human.
I've already told you about Noah who took a photograph of himself everyday for 6 years.
Jonathan did the same only for 8 years and compressed it to a 5 minute video
The Golberg family 1974- 2004
9 months of gestation in 20 seconds
Hattie asks where are the children? We want to see babies turn into adolescents in 1 minute.
You could start by taking a photo of your baby, wearing a white Tshirt in the same place the first of every month. Continue for 18 years. Follow the arrow of Time.
From the Creative Gene comes the Carnival of Genealogy with a theme of Writing a Family History. .
There's 23 Tips for Writing a Family History and Learn about you by writing your memoir
With the success of best sellers such as Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, writing memoir has attained a new status in the literary world. It has achieved such power because it invites memoirists to select incidents in their past and interpret them with the emotional honesty and wisdom that only time, distance and maturity can illuminate.
Memoir is not autobiography, chronicling the epic of one's life and creating a genealogy. It is the genre that gives credibility to our deepest feelings. It can be one page or 100 and be as simple as a 10-year-old's paragraph on his love for his grandfather. It can also be as profound as James McBride's The Color of Water, a 314-page remembrance written from two viewpoints.
By writing memoir, children and adults become critical thinkers. One of the best compliments I ever received as a teacher was when an elderly woman in a class of senior citizens gleamed with great relief, explaining that I had freed her. She finally understood that she didn't have to write about her ancestors, her birth and every incident in her past. She could select the episodes that had impacted her most. She chose to write about the death of her husband, her feelings of loss and her resurrection. When she read her memoir, others in the class who identified with her grief and joy were comforted by her words.
Very interesting links if you're just getting started.
Tucked in a plain white envelope, it's much more: a Marine's final message to those he loved.
"Well if (you're) reading this I guess this deployment was a one way trip."
Those chilling words open a "death letter" from a fallen Marine, one of two San Antonians killed together in Haditha, Iraq.
At first glance, it looks like an ordinary piece of mail.
Tucked in a plain white envelope, it's much more: a Marine's final message to those he loved.
"Well if (you're) reading this I guess this deployment was a one way trip."
Those chilling words open a "death letter" from a fallen Marine, one of two San Antonians killed together in Haditha, Iraq.
No one seems to know exactly when during his two-month tour that Lance Graham, a lance corporal, supply clerk and gunner, took out a black ink pen and some steno paper, gathered his thoughts on mortality and wrote the three-page letter.
But Graham's father, Joseph Graham, remembers when the letter arrived. Two Marines delivered it and offered to read it aloud.
The elder Graham opted to read it with his own eyes, at his dining table.
His son, who had died May 7, 2005, in an insurgent ambush, had, without knowing when or whether he would meet his death in Iraq, written a loving farewell to friends and family members — and a moving tribute to those who serve.
"I just have a few things to ask. Please don't be mad at the Marine Corps. It was my choice to join and come here."
Letters such as Graham's have a long tradition in the military, one that continues even into an age when instant messaging and e-mail have rendered letter-writing a lost art. Some troops write death letters after a bad dream, battle or attack. Then they fold them up and tuck them into wallets, pockets or backpacks. Or hand them to other troops in other units for safekeeping.
Some send them on home with a caveat they're only to be read if the author is killed.
Ultimately, most death letters are destroyed. Graham's fate, however, ensured his would be a sincere, living testament of his loyalty to his family, his nation and his branch of service.
He took a picture of himself everyday for 6 years. Noah, everyday
Apartments, backgrounds, clothes change and his hair has its own mind. Remarkably, Noah maintains the same expression, the same eyes.
Timelines are always an interesting part of your Legacy Archives.
Mena Trott, co-founder of Six Apart takes a photo of herself everyday o show her Mom, to remember what that day was about and to slow life down,
It's a sad day when a western government destroys important historical records.
Another reason to preserve and maintain your family records and stories in your own Personal Legacy Archives.
Belgian Authorities Destroy Holocaust Records.
The Belgian authorities have destroyed archives and records relating to the persecution and deportation of Jews in Belgium in the 1930s and 1940s. Some of this happened as recently as the late 1990s. This was revealed during hearings in the Belgian Senate last Spring.
Blogging will be slight as I take some time off to travel and visit family, attend a wedding and just enjoy myself in Denver, San Francisco and Seattle.
My blog reading will be lighter than usual as well, but one I never miss is Ronni Bennett. And not just because she often makes a kind mention and links to me and Legacy Matters
Fellow bloggers, go over and read The Need for a Final Blog Post.
Ronni writes about the hierarchy of people surrounding us, all of whom deserve to be notified when you pass on. It's not morbid at all to think about how you want to be remembered. Thinking of others and what you will leave behind is easier when you put on the mind of legacy.
I hope my upcoming book Your Legacy Matters will give you some ideas and make it easier for you as well.
Much more anon.
"Could you PLEASE, PLEASE send me your bread-pudding recipe from your original book -- my husband gave it to me years ago with a wonderful message comparing our marriage as a mixture of 'spices,' " wrote Elaine Acosta in an email message to Paul Prudhomme, owner of K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen in the French Quarter and author of eight cookbooks. "My house blew or floated down Hwy. 11 and I lost everything. I'm living with my daughter and son-in-law and their family and they want bread pudding, NOW!"
Comforting Food: Recapturing Recipes Katrina Took Away.
How many memories are contained in dog-eared, splotched, nearly illegible recipe cards mothers keep in battered tins on kitchen counters?
Food is how we keep our family traditions and culture alive. I know I am flooded with memories of Floss when I eat ginger snaps made from her recipe. One brother who had many sojourns in Asia always traveled with the recipe for her gravy. Think about what family recipes you would be desolated to lose.
Every year my mother makes a special trip to Chinatown for raw peanuts, the essential ingredient for her renowned peanut brittle. With a 50 year- old pressure cooker, now used only brittle, she makes batches of peanut brittle every year to give away at Christmas to the mailman, the newspaper delivery girl, the folks at her car dealer's and countless family friends. After Thanksgiving, anticipation builds and mouths begin to water with the foretaste of the treat in store for them.
Christmas wouldn't be Christmas without Ruth's peanut brittle.
Unlike the baker who kept the secret of his cinnamon cake and took the recipe to his grave, I've captured the secret of Ruth's peanut brittle, but I need a few more before I can make a book of it.
Consider making some of your favorite, family recipes part of your Personal Legacy Archives. Using Blurb, you can make a book of the best and give it away to relatives for Christmas.
Novelist Frederick Reuss Fleshes Out a Family Album in A Murky Picture, Developed and Enlarged
This last photograph was taken in 1934, Reuss tells you, not long before the man sailed off to Shanghai, leaving the woman and the laughing girl behind. He is Max Mohr: a physician, minor German literary figure and Reuss's great-uncle. She is Mohr's wife, Kathe, and the girl is their daughter, Eva. Long drawn to their story -- and having discovered a trove of photos, letters and other documents about them -- Reuss set out to reimagine their lives.
The result was "Mohr: A Novel" -- an unusually close collaboration between fiction and fact.
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Unlike memory, photographs do not in themselves preserve meaning" he reads. "Only that which narrates can make us understand."
Remember and repeat.
"Photographs do not in themselves preserve meaning. Only that which narrates can make us understand"
Capture your meaning on your favorite photos by thinking of it as a postcard and writing what it means in a few sentences.
Lots of interesting links to help you with your Legacy Archives over at Family Oral History using digital tools.
Coney Island Voices, an oral history project
How the Veteran History Project was sparked by family oral history
Coastal Oral History projects that document life in North Carolina, Florida, California
How hard it is to ask "What happened?" yet the answers explain so much.
These posts serve as inspiration and later as a resource for your own.
New technology and cheaper storage are making it possible to digitize and index fragile historical documents.
The Wall St Journal reports today on New Ways to Dig for Your Roots Online. (subscribers only).
The preservation efforts are part of a massive global effort to digitize a variety of content for safekeeping and easy searching, such as Google Inc.'s effort to scan libraries of books. Online genealogy companies say that last year's devastating hurricane season, which destroyed several archives in the South, has also increased demand for partnership programs in which they digitize local archives in exchange for being able to offer the sources to the public through their sites.
If you haven't started to search for your family roots online, now is a great time to start.
For those of you who want to commemorate a special event but have no desire to create your own show, you can hire someone to do it for you.
Two women in Houston, Stefani Twyford and Isabelle MacCrimmon have started Legacy Multimedia to capture just what you want for your personal Legacy Archives.
Poke around their site to see what can be done either by you or by a professional
From a New York Times book review by Russell Shorto of 
"Mayflower : A Story of Courage, Community, and War" (Nathaniel Philbrick)
Not long after the Pilgrims set anchor in the harbor they called Plymouth in 1620, the Wampanoag leader Massasoit paid them a visit near their makeshift settlement and made a wary offer of friendship.
It took several months for two of the Pilgrims to venture into the wilderness and return the gesture. When they did, they noticed circular pits alongside the trails, which, the natives told them, were storytelling devices. Each of these "memory holes" was dug at a place where a remarkable act had occurred; every time Indians passed by these spots, they recounted the deeds.
The Pilgrims, Nathaniel Philbrick says in his vivid and remarkably fresh retelling of the story of the earnest band of English men and women who became saddled with the sobriquet of America's founders, "began to see that they were traversing a mythic land, where a sense of community extended far into the distant past."
My Book, by Me in Fast Company
"Getting published" has always meant something special to us writer types; a book with your name on it says you've arrived. And now, thanks to the Internet, I'm a genuine published author. My publisher? Me.
Blurb is an online service that lets you create and publish the next great American novel.
It took all of a day, using a new online service called Blurb. Its approach is remarkably accessible. You choose a theme, page layout, picture and text sizes, and fonts from a range of options. The software is easy to navigate, if frustratingly slow at times. I uploaded image files from a CD, dragged pictures into place, and watched pages fill up with my original work.
For less than $30 each , you can publish your blog book, your dog book, your baby book, your treasured recipes, your travel memoirs and your digital scrapbooks.
Since I believe we should keep the treasures we love in two forms, digital and paper, this is good news.
From neo-neo con. Ah, the joy of organizing: going through old papers.
Going through much of it is a strangely emotional experience. Old cards--birthdays, anniversaries, loves gained and lost. Photos of me and my boyfriend who went to Vietnam, and his last letter, the only one I saved (for those of you who haven't read my posts on that subject: yes, he did return, but no, we didn't marry). Photos from college--me, impossibly young, sporting one of those long flippy "do's" that required setting on rollers the size of beer cans; old friends from that era, some of them now dead. Poems that make me cry when I stop to read them. My diplomas. A photocopy of the check from Central Casting Corporation I got for doing a "silent bit" as a dancer in the film "The Turning Point" (see this).
In one file entitled "School--grades and awards" are all my old report cards (height: 48 1/4 inches, weight, 51 pounds, first grade). Even now those report cards have the power to stir a hint of anxiety in me, remembering the drama of the reading of the names and the doling out of the little cardboard squares representing so much work. My SAT scores. My GRE scores. My scholarships, and some newspaper clippings announcing same. A little card of commendation with a gold star on it, given to me in third grade for a bunch of poems I wrote, illustrated, and compiled into a scrapbook for extra credit and for fun ("Snowflakes falling, down, down, down...)
Letters from a few famous people I wrote to who had the decency to write back, some at great length (Oliver Sacks, for one). A huge file of poetry I like that isn't anthologized in any books I own. My own poetry, with many different alternative drafts (ah, my biographer will be so grateful!) A folder filled with the condolence letters people wrote my mother when my grandmother died in the late 60s, which still have the power to evoke her warm presence and vitality.
The new collaborative art work on the Web is a little bit like Post Secret is called The Saddest Thing I Own.
It's a glimpse into the rich, interior lives we all have and I hope an inspiration for a digital story you can create for your Legacy Archives.
William Zinseer wrote the classic On Writing Well may well have written another.
"How to Write a Memoir" (William K. Zinsser)
Below are excerpts from an NPR interview On Memoir, Truth and 'Writing Well'
You must make a series of reducing decisions. For example: in a family history, one big decision would be to write about only one branch of the family. Families are complex organisms, especially if you trace them back several generations. Decide to write about your mother's side of the family or your father's side, but not both. Return to the other one later and make it a separate project.
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My final reducing advice can be summed up in two words: think small. Don't rummage around in your past -- or your family's past -- to find episodes that you think are "important" enough to be worthy of including in your memoir. Look for small self-contained incidents that are still vivid in your memory. If you still remember them it's because they contain a universal truth that your readers will recognize from their own life.
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I never felt that my memoir had to include all the important things that ever happened to me -- a common temptation when old people sit down to summarize their life journey. On the contrary, many of the chapters in my book are about small episodes that were not objectively "important" but that were important to me. Because they were important to me they also struck an emotional chord with readers, touching a universal truth that was important to them.
From Ronni Bennett, what looks like a great site on how to make your family oral history using digital tools.
In addition to lots of good tips, Suzanne Kitchens also has a blog which she'll get back to once she finishes her taxes.
UPDATE: It's Susan not Suzanne and she's got an RSS feed.
I found the Laurence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks at Princeton AMAZING.
Masks captured faces long before photographs. I felt a real contact with people dead hundreds of years as I gazed at their faces.
Queen Elizabeth I
Benjamin Franklin's life mask
Thomas Paine death mask
Johann Wolfgang Goethe - life mask
James Dean, life mask. Doesn't he look a bit like Russell Crowe?
via Hanan Levin
David Dornstein, while at Brown, had an idea for a fictional autobiography.
''The idea?" his brother would write later. ''An unknown young writer dies in a plane crash leaving behind lots of notebooks and bits of stories, and the narrator sets out to piece it all together into a story of the unknown writer's life."
Only 25 when the Libyan terrorists blew Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland in 1968, David Dornstein fell 6 miles to earth.
Fortunately, he had left lots of notebooks and story ideas from which his brother Ken pieced together David's life and his own.
From Beyond Biography, a book review by Daniel Akst in the Boston Globe
Ken didn't just visit the remains of the Boeing aircraft and determine where David sat in relation to the fateful load of Semtex explosives. He pored over his brother's most private writings. He interviewed David's friends. He tracked down his brother's childhood sexual abuser. He became romantically involved with not one but two of David's main love interests. Eventually he married one of them.
"The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky : A True Story" (Ken Dornstein)
Sometimes your stories are just too good not to share. Maybe it's a secret you don't want your family to know. Maybe it's just a message that you think the future should know.
For those you need Earth Capsule.
For your Legacy Archives, How to take great digital portraits from Lifehacker
If you take away only four things from this guide, let it be these: use portrait mode, go to max telephoto, get outside and force the flash
Our soldiers in Iraq have used digital photography, video and Internet access to stay in closer touch to family and friends back home than in any other war. Now reports Dionne Searcey in the Wall Street Journal, they are "creating a powerful and raw new wave of war memorials".
On Iraq's Front Lines, Digital Memorials for Fallen Friends. (subscribers only)
When soldiers are killed in Iraq, all you see in the paper is name, rank and age," said Mr. Rieckhoff, a first lieutenant. The videos, he said, are "cathartic and a way to eternally honor their memory."
In another memorial video, Army Master Sgt. Brian Mack, who died in Mosul a year ago this month, is shown in photos riding in a Blackhawk helicopter and in a short video clip rushing a stationary target during gun practice, shooting repeatedly while friends laugh. It's set to the melancholy song "Clocks" by Coldplay.
"Every time someone was killed, we put together a little thing like that," said Sgt. Emmet Cullen, a sniper who fought alongside Master Sgt. Mack. "It helps the grieving process putting them together. Talking about them, seeing them with a big goofy smile on -- it helps."
Here are links to memorial videos made by their army buddies.
Juan Solorio
Zachary Wobler
Christopher Pusateri
With gratitude for your service, may you rest in peace.
The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation is collecting stories about that terrible day for its digital archive.
Add your own story and be part of the building of the historical record.
And, while you're at it, make it part of your own Legacy Archives.
Gerald Van der Leun of the American Digest left New York City in November 2002. Since he knew he would be leaving, he made his own record of the city where he lived for almost 30 years. From his post Project 1-2006: 1000 Pictures of New York City (10% Done) . vividly
WHEN A MAN has lived a long time with a city and then decided to leave her, it seems best to make a record before departing. Otherwise, for all the years he has lived with her, all he will have left will be the shards of moments and not the mosaic complete.
The archives he retains will, invariably, be merely personal -- clippings from the local papers, a box of business cards, filched matchbooks, a sheaf of menus, random pay stubs, a well-thumbed Rolodex, and a few albums filled with pictures of friends and acquaintances remembered with varying degrees of accuracy. And his snapshots.
He knew his memories of the city would fade, so
Knowing this, and knowing soon after the 11th that I would leave, I resolved to record New York City as I knew her in that last year without sham or falsity.
Beginning in early October of 2001 and ending at around ten in the evening of November 9, 2002, I kept a detailed photographic record of what we were like and how we lived in New York in that shaky first year of our unsought new era.
His photostream at Flickr captures a vivid sense of place of city and its people that stands alone for anyone to see but was for him the background of his life.
He reminds me again that often what is most interesting is the background, what we don't see or take for granted because it's so ordinary and normal. We all remember to take photographs on vacation, at birthday celebrations and at Christmas, but how many of us really see the background of our own lives. Yet, what people really want to know is how you lived and just what were your normal days like. I can't think of anything that would cultivate a seeing eye better than picking up a camera and just walking around your house, the street where you live, your neighborhood, your town, your stomping grounds, taking pictures of what captures your eye.
Jorge Luis Borges, the blind, Argentinian poet and writer once said, if I remember correctly, something like 24 hours fully observed would give any man enough to think about if he were imprisoned for the rest of his life. I think just walking around and really looking will fire your creative juices.
With Gerard's fine example before me, I think taking even one day this year to document your surroundings would be a fine addition to your Legacy Archives. I'm going to do it, but I think I'll wait till it gets a little warmer.
Well I'm back again and in my new place blogging for the first time. It seems I just couldn't think of blogging when there were boxes to pack and hundreds of boxes to unpack with all my things that have been in storage for several years. Needless to say, that took all my energy.
Since I finally have access to all my photos so you can expect a lot of posts about your personal legacy archives as I construct my own.
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas or Hanukah or both and my best wishes for a healthy, wealthy happy New Year.
Chris Rose tells us what is it like driving by the "haunting messages and mystical artifacts [that] adorn the homes of neighborhoods struggling to come back from the dead. Via Ernie the Attorney
I drive around and try to figure out those Byzantine markings and symbols that the cops and the National Guard spray-painted on all the houses around here, cryptic communications that tell the story of who or what was or wasn't inside the house when the floodwater rose to the ceiling.
In some cases, there's no interpretation needed. There's one I pass on St. Roch Avenue in the 8th Ward at least once a week. It says: "1 dead in attic."
That certainly sums up the situation. No mystery there.
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I wonder who eventually came and took 1 Dead in Attic away. Who knows? Hell, with the way things run around here -- I wonder if anyone has come to take 1 Dead in Attic away.
And who claimed him or her? Who grieved over 1 Dead in Attic and who buried 1 Dead in Attic?
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I wonder if I ever met 1 Dead in Attic. Maybe in the course of my job or maybe at a Saints game or maybe we once stood next to each other at a Mardi Gras parade or maybe we once flipped each other off in a traffic jam.
1 Dead in Attic could have been my mail carrier, a waitress at my favorite restaurant or the guy who burglarized my house a couple years ago. Who knows?
My wife, she's right. I've got to quit just randomly driving around. This can't be helping anything.
On the other hand, there are the Mardi Gras Indians
On several desolate streets that I drive down, I see where some folks have returned to a few of the homes and they haven't bothered to put their furniture and appliances out on the curb -- what's the point, really? -- but they have retrieved their tattered and muddy Indian suits and sequins and feathers and they have nailed them to the fronts of their houses.
The colors of these displays is startling because everything else in the 8th is gray. The streets, the walls, the cars, even the trees. Just gray.
So the oranges and blues and greens of the Indian costumes are something beautiful to behold, like the first flowers to bloom after the fallout. I don't know what the significance of these displays is, but they hold a mystical fascination for me.
November 29th is the birthday of Louisa May Alcott, "the most disagreeable month of the whole year." Because her father Bronson Alcott kept a journal of his four daughters' growth and because we have the marvelous resource of the Library of Congress and the American Memory Project, we know what Louisa was like at age 2.
Louisa…manifests uncommon activity and force of mind at present…by force of will and practical talent, [she] realizes all that she conceives… Bronson Alcott, November 5, 1834.
I also learned that Louisa was home-schooled.
The Alcott girls enjoyed the natural beauty of Concord, boating on the river, ice skating on Walden Pond, and running free in the surrounding fields and woods. Henry David Thoreau was one of Louisa's instructors when she was a young girl. In one of his fanciful lessons, he taught her that a cobweb was a "handkerchief dropped by a fairy." As a teenager, Louisa enjoyed borrowing books from Ralph Waldo Emerson's collection and delighted in conversing with the "sage of Concord."
For the most part, the Alcotts taught their daughters at home. Daily journal-keeping formed a significant part of the home curriculum. Louisa and her sisters wrote a weekly newspaper in which they recorded family events and published their literary and artistic endeavors.
We are fortunate that Orchard House in Concord is open for tours, live and online. For countless American women who identified with Jo - "CHRISTMAS won't be Christmas without any presents" grumbled Jo lying on the rug, Little Women in book form or DVD - (the Katherine Hepburn version, the June Allyson version or the Winona Ryder version) still remains a favorite gift for daughters and nieces, a passing on of the Great Legacy of Louisa May.
Image from a Louisa May Alcott fan site
When personal memoirs tell the truth and authoritative sources do not.
The most notorious case is that of Walter Duranty, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times who won a Pulitzer award for his reports that we now know covered up some of the most infamous crimes of the Stalin era.
Here are some choice bits by one of the best known correspondents in the world of one of the best known newspapers in the world collected by Arnold Beichman in the Weekly Standard.
"There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be."
--New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931, page 1
great
"Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda."
--New York Times, August 23, 1933
At a time when Ukrainian peasants were dying at a rate of 25,000/day, Duranty when asked what he was going to write, remarked.
Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated.
Contrast that reporting with a Memoir of The Great Famine of 1933 by Maria D who writes at Aussie Girl.
Soon, the terrible, black specter of the Stalin created Famine-Genocide of l932-33 spread throughout the land. And even though I was still quite young, I remember that frightening apparition of the famine very well. Images that are seared in my memory forever -- hundreds -- thousands of people, their limbs and bellies grotesquely swollen from starvation -- the walking dead, the half-dead and the dead -- orphaned children wandering homeless and begging for food in the streets -- or simply dying in the gutters.
In school during class a small boy suddenly pitched forward onto his desk and died -- I shall never forget the sound of his head hitting the desk -- and he wasn't the only one. And the textbooks, newspapers and so-called "artistic literature" all around us overflowed with the slogan: "We are grateful to Comrade Stalin for our happy childhood!" What obscene and monstrous mockery!
There is no greater authority than personal witness. Such witness is a gift to the world, not just a family. Elie Wiesel, great witness to the Holocaust, said
I decided to devote my life to telling the story because I felt that having survived I owe something to the dead. and anyone who does not remember betrays them again.
and
"That is my major preoccupation /memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it."
The Legacy Archives you create for yourself, your family and the world is your Kingdom of Memory. Preserve your kingdom.
Fascinating piece in the New York Times today about many Hispanics who are discovering while researching their family history that they are descended from 'Hidden' Jews who fled the Inquisition in Spain to settle in Mexico four centuries ago. Hispanics Uncovering Roots as Inquisition's Hidden Jews.
For more than two decades, anecdotal evidence collected by researchers in New Mexico, Colorado and Texas suggested that some nominally Catholic families of Iberian descent had stealthily maintained Jewish customs throughout the centuries, including lighting candles on Friday evening, avoiding pork and having the Star of David inscribed on gravestones.
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Modern science may now be shedding new light on the history of the crypto-Jews after molecular anthropologists recently developed a DNA test of the male or Y chromosome that can indicate an ancestral connection to the Cohanim, a priestly class of Jews that traces its origin back more than 3,000 years to Aaron, the older brother of Moses.
Family Tree DNA, a Houston company that offers a Cohanim test to its male clients, gets about one inquiry a day from Hispanics interested in exploring the possibility of Jewish ancestry, said Bennett Greenspan, its founder and chief executive. Mr. Greenspan said about one in 10 of the Hispanic men tested by his company showed Semitic ancestry strongly suggesting a Jewish background.
I didn't have time to read the whole paper today, so I'm happy to thank Ann Althouse whose post "the fingerprints of my past were all around me, but I didn't know what they meant."
Here's an interesting way to go about adding to your Legacy Archives.
A storyboard is a sequence of images and words drawn together on a page to form a plausible narrative.
Storyboards are routinely used in the movie making business to 'preview' a movie before a single shot is taken. Not only does a storyboard allow for a dress rehearsal of the final product but by the very fact of being posted on the wall,it elicits early feedback and encourages quick, painless editing, leading to significant savings in time and resources.
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A storyboard is an apt metaphor for how we make sense of our own life history. Storyboarding can be used to sense emergent patterns in our own life story and to envision the life experiences that we wish to welcome into our future.
This story will give you the chills and give you some sense of the power of your personal Legacy Archives and the marvelous hand of fate.
A fiery book, a daughter's soul, the 30 year sore of a military intelligence officer and a publishing phenomenon in Vietnam. Vietnamese family reunites with fallen daughter by Elliott Blackburn.
Doan Ngoc Tram fell to her knees before the small cardboard box.
Her three daughters crowded close, holding her, as two small bone clasps were carefully undone and the lid of the box lifted. Two small, brown books sat side by side.
Ngoc Tram wept. The stoic woman clutched the diaries of her eldest daughter against her chest for the first time.
"This is the spirit of my sister," her daughter Dang Hien Tram later said through an interpreter. "This is my sister's soul."
The family had traveled thousands of miles from home to see the memoirs Wednesday, now held at the Texas Tech Vietnam Center.
The diaries hold the intimate details of the last few years of a young battlefield surgeon's life. They describe hiding in a trench filled with water to the neck, reciting poetry to pass the time. They share the private anguish of a young doctor's losing war on death.
They are of skies of fire and cratered earth, of battle-ravaged hospitals staffed with revolutionary fervor, of the love of family and country.
They are tales captured by an enemy that protected them for three decades; two diaries that joined two families separated by war.
A fiery book
Fred Whitehurst was standing before a drum of burning documents when his life changed.
A fiery book
Fred Whitehurst was standing before a drum of burning documents when his life changed.
Whitehurst was a military intelligence officer in his twenties, a self-described country boy from North Carolina who arrived in Vietnam in March 1969. As a non-commissioned officer in military intelligence, he interviewed prisoners and combed through captured documents with the help of South Vietnamese translators.
Documents with military value were sent to Saigon, but there was no place to store the captured poetry, letters from home and personal documents written by North Vietnamese soldiers or sympathizers.
Whitehurst routinely burned thousands of such documents in a 55-gallon barrel on the site, per military orders. But he was struck when a translator thumbed through a diary he had picked up from the pile and stopped him.
"Don't burn this one, Fred," Whitehurst remembered him saying. "It has fire in it already."
--
The sore
Fred held on to the diary for more than 30 years, hoping to return the book to Thuy's family.
"It was one of those unfinished things; it was like a sore that continued to bother and bother him," Robert said. "We talked about it on and on for 30 years."
At first, there was no way to find the family - Vietnam was off limits during the 1970s, he said. Fred considered a book or movie based on the diaries to attract the attention of the family. He dreamed of using any profit from the deal to build a hospital in Vietnam, a dream he now sheepishly described as childish.
"That's a stupid idea, a movie idea," Fred said.
The translations grew more refined. Robert, a riverboat pilot in the Vietnam War, spoke the language. Now a tugboat captain in New Orleans, he would spend each month he wasn't at sea translating the diaries his brother had recovered, struggling with his rusty Vietnamese and immersed in the story.
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Finding Madam Tram
Ted Engelmann woke up to a ringing cell phone and splitting headache.
It was late April. Engelmann was in Vietnam hoping to complete the last phase of his life's work: a 37-year book project chronicling the changing memorials and scenes from four countries ravaged by the Vietnam War. He too was a Vietnam War veteran, an Air Force sergeant who directed air strikes.
Only a few days earlier, Engelmann had briefly met Fred and Robert Whitehurst. The social studies teacher listened to their hour-long presentation on the diary at the symposium, and volunteered to take a CD of scanned images to Hanoi.
It was late April. Engelmann was in Vietnam hoping to complete the last phase of his life's work: a 37-year book project chronicling the changing memorials and scenes from four countries ravaged by the Vietnam War. He too was a Vietnam War veteran, an Air Force sergeant who directed air strikes.
Only a few days earlier, Engelmann had briefly met Fred and Robert Whitehurst. The social studies teacher listened to their hour-long presentation on the diary at the symposium, and volunteered to take a CD of scanned images to Hanoi.
Now he was awake with a searing stress headache and Dang Thuy Tram's very excited sister on the phone.
"When can you be here?" she asked.
Engelmann said he moved every six months or so to different countries, and had developed contacts in Vietnam. He had landed in Hanoi carrying the disc, and sought the help of Lady Borden, a Quaker with good connections in the country.
Engelmann explained his mission to two of her assistants, expecting little. They called a hospital on the outskirts of the city referenced in the first recovered diary, but made no immediate progress, so he left. He was now in Ho Chi Minh City (previously Saigon), where he planned to shoot his final frames on the 37th anniversary of the fall of the capital.
The phone call was confusing, but the woman was insistent, he remembered.
"Then I realized who they were," Engelmann said. "Half my brain was hurting like hell, and the other half was trying to figure out how to help."
Tram's sisters and brother-in-law picked him up at the Hanoi airport. They traveled to a narrow concrete home with cream-colored walls. Engelmann carried his laptop and the CD of diary images in through the front door to a living room, and almost stepped back out in shock.
The house was packed with relatives and television camera crews.
"There were just so many people in there, and I didn't know who any of the people were," Engelmann said.
The entire home was not much larger than a typical American living room, he said. About 15 or 20 people crowded a small den of cushioned chairs and couches. A vase of white flowers - Thuy's favorite, he was told - stood next to one couch. Beyond was a small kitchen with a large table set for a great meal. Upstairs, under a ceiling that made the 6-foot-1-inch Engelmann bend over to stand, were bedrooms.
He took the place of honor at a kitchen table. He turned on his laptop, loaded the CD, and showed the family the two folders of images of the diaries.
"After that, I moved out of the way," Engelmann said.
Tears welled in the eyes of Thuy's mother, a gentle but strong 81-year-old matriarch, he said. He learned that earlier that year, in three major Vietnamese newspapers, the family had participated in news articles asking if anyone had any information about their fallen daughter. For months there had been no response.
Now an American veteran, an enemy soldier, had appeared unannounced to hand them their daughter's most intimate thoughts and memories on a disk.
"Here's a mom who's getting something back about her daughter," Engelmann said. "I was the guy who was able to give it to her, and I was just overwhelmed."
The believable hero
Ted Engelmann changed his plans, and finished his book with photographs from a trip he took with the Tram family to honor Thuy's grave. Fred Whitehurst was overjoyed to learn that the family had been almost immediately found, and traveled with his brother to Vietnam in August to meet the mother and sisters of the author who had haunted him.
Fred worried for years that the family would simply accept the diaries and then close the door. He returned with an adopted mother and sisters, he said.
"They really adopted us," Fred said. "How crazy is that?"
They quickly learned that the diaries had touched more than the Whitehurst family.
A normal press run for books in Vietnam is 1,000 - maybe 5,000 for very popular novels, said Quang Phu Van, a professor of Vietnamese Language and Literature in the Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies.
The Dang Thuy Tram diaries, published this summer, have hit 200,000 according to the Vietnam Center.
Unlike previously published stories of war heroes issued by the government, tales of almost superhuman sacrifice and dedication, Vietnamese can relate to the stories of Thuy Tram and another recently published diary from a North Vietnamese soldier, Van said.
"This is something very genuine, and that's become a phenomenon in Vietnam," he said, adding that his father carries a copy of the diaries with him. "Someone who shared a loss of innocence, the guilt; this is something that people have a chance to see something different. Everyone talks about it."
Such stories are rare, said Vietnam Center associate director Stephen Maxner, though he wondered if more diaries kept by American soldiers would come forward after this.
Changing lives
The family wiped tears from their eyes and leafed through the diaries Wednesday morning at the Texas Tech Vietnam Center. At first overwhelmed with emotion, Thuy Tram's sisters thanked the archivists for preserving her diaries. Kim Tram hoped the stories would help bring the U.S. and Vietnam closer.
The Tram family found their sister and daughter again. The two handmade books with clean blue cursive writing had soul, they said.
"When we came to touch the diary, I had a feeling she'd come back with us," Kim Tram said through an interpreter.
Though they were not present, the experience had changed the Whitehurst brothers, too.
"I understand a lot more about the whole thing I was involved in as a young man because of this," Robert said. "I don't think I'll ever completely let go of it."
Fred dismisses his role in the story: "All I am is the camel that carried the water across the desert." He does not want closure from the war, does not want to forget what happened, he said. He does not want accolades.
He wants his mother to meet his adopted mother, which they will do later this week. And he takes joy in one final bit of serendipity - the popularity of the books has inspired a drive to build a hospital in Dang Thuy Tram's name, he said.
"Every flipping penny of it is going to a hospital in Pho Cuong," Whitehurst marveled. "My foolish, kind of childish dream of hospital beds in Duc Pho, it's coming true. To continue her life's work through such a bizarre path - me? It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck."
Bob Dylan is looking to control his own legacy reports the Wall St. Journal. If Dylan's taking care to choose how he wants to be remembered, shouldn't you be thinking about the same thing?
With a torrent of new projects focusing on his most-revered period, from 1961 to 1966, the singer is pre-empting the posthumous image-massaging that has confronted many rock estates by dealing with his own legacy now, while the 64-year-old is still very much alive.
The DVD release today of the 3½-hour, Martin Scorsese-directed documentary "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan" is part of a multipronged project in which Mr. Dylan has aggressively focused attention on his transformation from baby-faced folk singer to rock 'n' roll icon.
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In that way, Mr. Dylan is staking out unusual ground for a rock star. The process of picking through an artist's archives for clues about his or her creative evolution is often left to heirs and others after the musician's death. The estates of Jimi Hendrix, Mr. Cobain and Tupac Shakur all have made cottage industries of issuing rarities, album outtakes, obscure live recordings, and the like. But that process is often contentious, like the long legal battle among Mr. Hendrix's heirs, record labels and producers. The fights frequently lead to cheap repackagings of old material, designed more to make heirs a quick buck than to craft a lasting legacy.
Via Instapundit, reader Jim Martin urges people to detail the historic structures in which they live.
As inexpensive as digital images are and having the ability to archive them on DVD discs everyone should take the time to photograph, in detail, the histOric structures where they live. The huge damage Katrina wrought to the Gulf Coast is a hard lesson for the rest of the coutry. Most of the old antebellum mansions are totally erased and will never be recontsucted. It would have been nice to have had detailed photos of them for posterity in a safe place far from hurricanes.
There are hundreds of old buildings, some on the National Registry of Historic Sites, which need to be photographed from all angles: up close, inside and outside to show minute detail of construction methods. Molded ceiling plaster motifs come to mind. If any of these structures are damaged by fire or storms and enough remains for restoration, architects and builders will find photos taken as special projects by archivists a great advantage.
A weekend is all many would require, a great Fall project to get started. Go to the mountains and take photos of log cabins when the leaves have changed. Go to historic sites in your hometown, all of them, large and small. They aren't important until they are gone and it's too late.
Good advice and a great family project. We are connected in many ways, part of the houses we inhabit and the communities where we live.
You don't have to have an historic house to document it easily for the future. Who knows what use it can be put to in the decades ahead?
I'm blogging about the catastrophe in New Orleans and Mississippi over at Business of Life.
It's life that counts now. It's Search and Rescue Time. Time to save as many human lives as possible.
Time soon enough to find and bury the dead.
Time soon enough realize that everything has changed and the past will never be again.
Too much of what existed last week never will again.
Here's cobaltgreen, from katriancane's friends.
It's times like this when you make realize what belongings you really cherish. I'm hoping my footage tapes of the recent interviews for The Documentary can be recovered... they are some of the last recordings of the New Orleans I love. The New Orleans that will never again exist.
Technorati Tags: flood, Hurricane Katrina
Don't miss this story by Gerard Van der Leun the namesake of an uncle he never knew. The Name in the Stone
Cut into the stone amongst a tally of the dead.
If you have an unusual name, there's nothing that prepares you for seeing it in a list of the dead on a summer Sunday afternoon in Battery Park in 1975. I don't really remember the feeling except to know that, for many long moments, I became suddenly chilled.
When that passed, I knew why my name was in the stone. I'd always known why, but I'd never known about the stone or the names cut into it.
"Gerard Van der Leun" was, of course, not me. He was someone else entirely. Someone who had been born, lived, and died before I was even conceived. He was my father's middle brother. He was what my family had given to stop Fascism, Totalitarianism and genocide in the Second World War. He was one of their three sons. He was dead before he was 22 years old. His body never recovered, the exact time and place of his death over the Atlantic, unknown.
Patti watched her stepfather die of lung cancer just 37 days after being diagnosed.
The timeframe of 37 days made an impression on me. We act as if we have all the time in the world - that's not a new understanding. But the definite-ness of 37 days struck me. So short a time, as if all the regrets of a life would barely have time to register before time was up.
And so, as always when awful things happen, I tried to figure out how to reconcile in my mind the fact that it was happening and the fact that the only thing I could do was try to make some good out of it. What emerged was a renewed commitment to ask myself this question every morning: 'what would I be doing today if I only had 37 days to live?'
It's a hard question some days.
But here's how I answered it: Write like hell, leave as much of myself behind for my two daughters as I could, let them know me and see me as a real person, not just a mother, leave with them for safe-keeping my thoughts and memories, fears and dreams, the histories of what I am and who my people are. Leave behind my thoughts about living the life, that "one wild and precious life" that poet Mary Oliver speaks of. That's what I'd do with my 37 days. So, I'm beginning here.
Her blog 37 days is a fine one. Patti shows how richly you can live when you keep the horizon line in sight. And how much fun you can have.
Every week she writes a new essay with a Do It Now Challenge Burn those jeans, always rent the red convertible, live an irresistible obituary, know the point of your life, find your own saxophone, and stand on your own rock
She's terrific, smart and wise and funny to boot, all while pondering the big questions. Don't miss her.
When you begin to write the stories of your life and your family, wonderful things can happen.
From the Washington Post, Faded Sketch Propels Families Across a Racial Divide, by Sudarsan Raghavan.
An elderly black woman drove up to the sand-colored mansion of a frail old white man in Prince George's County. She parked and walked slowly to the back entrance, as if by instinct. Under one arm, she carried a framed, faded sketch. Under the other, a roll of genealogy charts.
The sketch was of her great-great-grandparents, Basil and Lizzie Wood. They were long dead when Anna Holmes was born, but she had come to know them like her shadow.
Oden Bowie had met Basil and Lizzie. They worked for his family and may have been his ancestors' slaves. But until that chilly day in February 2002, Holmes had resisted asking for Bowie's help in writing this chapter of her family's history. For much of her life, reaching out to the white world meant crossing into a forbidding realm.
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It also unearthed something within her that had been buried by decades of discrimination.
"If you bonded with someone, you're going to be bonded whether they are black or white," she said.
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She is writing an autobiography to pass on to her descendants. She wants them "to know where they came from," she said, because "this is who they are." She will proudly tell them how they are now connected to one of Maryland's first families. She will tell them how Eugene Roberts now calls her "extended family."
One day, she sat her grandchildren down and told them about the kind white man whose gift she unravels every day.
"He could have just said, 'Oh, yeah, they are buried over here,' and that's the end of that," she told them. "He could have closed the door.
"But he didn't choose to do that."
If you haven't visited My Mom's Blog by Thoroughly Modern Millie, you're missing a treat.
Bloggers around the country are holding a surprise birthday party for Millie who's turning 80 today. Why not toddle on over, look around and add your best wishes to this amazing woman. She's showed everyone that you're never too old to blog and to delight.
Maureen Dowd pens a wonderful tribute to her mother who passed away last week.
MY mom always wanted to be a writer. In 1926, when she was 18, she applied for a job at The Washington Post. An editor there told her that the characters she'd meet as a reporter were far too shady for a nice young lady.
But someone who wants to write will find a way to write. And someone who wants to change the world can do it without a big platform or high-profile byline.
Just an ordinary life made extraordinary when closing examined.
Mom was not famous, but she was remarkable. Her library included Oscar Wilde, Civil War chronicles, Irish history and poetry books, as well as "Writing to the Point: Six Basic Steps," and the 1979 "Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Satisfactions of Housewifery and Motherhood in the Age of Do-Your-Own-Thing.'"
She touches on small things.
Without ever mentioning it to anyone, she constantly wrote out a stream of very small checks from her police widow's pension for children who were sick and poor.
She didn't limit her charity to poor kids. When 6-year-old Al Gore III was struck by a car in 1989, she sent him a get-well card and a crisp dollar bill. "Children like getting a little treat when they're not feeling well," she explained.
She traces the arc of a life that spanned much of the nation's history.
As a child she saw the last of the Civil War veterans marching in Memorial Day parades, and as the wife of a D.C. police inspector she made friends with her neighbor, Pop Seymour, the last person alive who saw Lincoln shot at Ford's Theater. (He was 5 and saw the president slump in his box.)
She tells stories.
One of her big thrills came in 1990 when she went to the White House Christmas party with me and President Bush gave her a kiss. On the way home, she said to me in a steely voice, "I don't ever want you to be mean to that man again."
Stories that paint a picture.
As my mom lay in pain, at 97 her organs finally shutting down, my sister asked her if she would like a highball. Over the last six years, Mom had managed to get through going into a wheelchair and losing her sight, all without painkillers or antidepressants - just her usual evening glass of bourbon and soda.
Her sense of taste was gone, and she could no longer speak, but she nodded, game as ever, just to show us you can have life even in death. We flavored her spoonful of ice chips with bourbon, soon followed by a morphine chaser.
And tell life lessons.
I just know that I will follow the advice she gave me in a letter while I was in college, after I didn't get asked to a Valentine's Day dance. She sent me a check for $15 and told me to always buy something red if you're blue - a lipstick, a dress.
"It will be your 'Red Badge of Courage,' " she wrote. And courage was a subject the lady knew something about.
If you want to write about your parents, Dowd's tribute is a great example of how to do it.
I've often written how important it is for people to create their own legacy archives, creating themselves what they want to pass on to the future and posterity. I've often called it a time capsule.
Dennis Severs, an American artist and Anglophile, created his time capsule in London at 18 Folgate St. In the 1970s, Severs bought a decrepit Georgian house and lived there for 30 years until his death from cancer at 51.
The house was his canvas, each room casting a different spell and portal to another time, brought to life through a visitor's imagination and senses.
Jane Black of the Washington Post tells the story.
I step through a low door into a warm, cozy kitchen. On the rustic pine table, there's a steaming cup of tea and a half-sliced loaf of brown bread. Dirty blue-and-white china dishes are in the sink and a fire burns brightly on the hearth. It's as if someone has just left the room--someone from the early 18th century.
I stand silently, listening to the clock tick. Then I hear the sound of a carriage approaching and disappearing down the street outside. "I see dead people," the famous line from the movie "The Sixth Sense," comes to mind.
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The Dennis Severs' House is intended to let visitors experience a living, breathing 18th-century home, where candles are still burned for light and tea is heated over an open fire.
If it sounds bizarre, it is. Each room is one of a series of still-life dramas. Severs sets the scene--the home of the fictional Jervises, a family of weavers--and the visitor creates the action. You look at furniture, portraits and handwritten lists, smell food cooking and coal burning in the stove, hear doors close and bells ring, then use that information to piece together what's happening. Artist David Hockney has described the house as one of the world's five greatest experiences.
That experience starts even before you enter: Gas lights flicker in the lamps outside the ivy-strewn Georgian town house, one of four on this cobblestone street. And although busy Liverpool Street Station is just moments away, silence surrounds the house.
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Indeed, it's the ghost of Severs that is most present in the house. Though he died of cancer in 2001 at age 51, his spirit remains. He prods you to open your eyes and laughs at your inability to truly see. In his bedroom on a side table is one of his many notes to visitors: "The 20th century is a fascinating place to visit, but surely nobody would ever want to live in it."
Stepping back into the din of London traffic, I can begin to see why Severs was keen to distance himself from modern society. A world of ghosts, especially friendly ones like the Jervis family, is a wonderful antidote to the pressures and pace of contemporary life. Living in the past is not for everyone. But as Severs was fond of saying, "You either see it or you don't."
You can take a virtual tour of the Dennis Severs house here
If you have collected first person oral histories from your family members, you may be wondering whether a collection might be interested. Here's a site called In the First Person that indexes some 2500 collections of oral history in English from around the world.
What a writer the Doctor is
How many gifts do we have, buried under a hardened armor, awaiting the gracious trauma of a shattered shell?
I've written a lot about business blogging and how businesses are changing everything. What I haven't written enough about is how blogging is the way we are recording our experiences and our thoughts here and now for ourselves but also in a form that will last for generations yet to come. What journals and letters were to the pioneers, blogs are to those who are colonizing cyberspace and marking their journeys.
Blogging is the way we find out what we think, what we value, who we are.
The Doctor writes about his year blogging .
I have always been a man of few words, preferring the quick quip to the thoughtful response–the right words always coming hours or days after the exchange. But writing: aahhh, there is a way to express your heart, to pour out your soul. The beauty of words, sometimes carefully chosen, sometimes flowing effortlessly from a source unseen, pounding out their rhythm and cadence, sometimes soft, sometimes stirring. Like music, they penetrate the spirit with power, deep speaking to deep.
I have learned to love great writers, and love to learn from them, in my own stumbling steps to imitate and emulate. And the web! Who could have imagined that a medium so poorly suited to reading–reading a book on computer an unimaginable chore–could prove so ideal for the comment, the essay, the quiet reflection, the fiery retort? Fascinating to see this medium evolve in ways never imagined–fascinating even more so to watch society, culture, country, and world change as a result. It is not the medium which transforms the world, but the voices of those rarely heard before.
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I am grateful to have this vehicle for catharsis, to formulate and organize thoughts otherwise scattered and incomplete.
Some time ago, I posted about Dr. Bob's remarkable essay, Dancing with Death, but then lost track of him. I happily rediscovered Dr. Bob after reading Gerard Vanderleun's post on Let Us Know Praise Remarkable Bloggers.
Rediscovery is what you will find yourself doing if you keep a blog.
You'll rediscover what you thought last year and, in time, your family will rediscover a lot more about you.
If you don't want to publish your thoughts for the whole word, consider a family blog that's password-protected or a private blog just for you. The process of writing what you think, feel and believe, what you've seen, done and experienced will force you to be more reflective. You'll think more deeply about what really matters and that will be a gift to you, to your family and to the future.
Richard Lawrence Cohen writes
Blogging is the best training in awareness of evanescence. I work on every post with as much sincerity as I would put into the same number of words in a novel. And there it goes.
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I have my archive, though. That’s my last resistance. I rarely enter my archive, but if it were lost I’d be heartbroken.
My hope is that one of my biological descendants will discover it and be inspired. It will help him or her do something really good, something that will really last. This great–grandchild will look back and send me a message of thanks.
Or there will be scholars who study the blogging phenomenon of the early twenty–first century. They may not even be human -- they may be artificial intelligences. Somehow they will hit upon my archive and include it among their sources, helping them learn what life here was like. So while I will never be widely known, I will always be known to about six readers.
This is my hope of resurrection
The BBC's story about the Seventh Annual Great Obituary Writers' Conference is called Death in Bath, or a meeting to die for.
Of course, nothing will beat last year's conference when Tim Bullamore was in the midst of extolling the glories of Bath, site of this year's conference, when the news came that President Reagan had died. His presentation was ruined as the audience reacted to the news with surprise, confusion and uproar, so the hapless man grabbed the microphone and bellowed, "Reagan's dead and he'll be deader. Let's go on with the show." But I digress.
This year there was general agreement that obituaries are short stories with death the incident that shapes them.
To Dr Cory Franklin from America, a great collector rather than writer, of obits, it is the life-changing details of lives that he finds fascinating. He quoted two recent examples. John Frankenheimer, the man who directed such Hollywood films as The Manchurian Candidate and The Birdman of Alcatraz, was the man who drove Bobby Kennedy to the hotel in Los Angeles in which he was shot dead. As a result, Frankenheimer was plunged into a depression which he never got over, his career ruined.
Always more about life than death, the obituary will reshape and reform with blogs, video and audio offering greater opportunities to tell everyone's life story.
Why not tell it your story your way? You may have many stories at different stages of your life that if you don't write down in some fashion, you will come to find that you forget them. Maybe, this is the time to start writing down the stories of your parents before they die.
You can be creative as you want with the abundance of digital tools available now. You'll probably discover patterns in your life you never realized, maybe even a deeper meaning and purpose when you start to think about what really matters
It's your life, you're the expert on your life and your Legacy Matters.
There are some fine examples of personal Legacy Archives at the Library of Congress. Pages from Her Story.
Ordinary women writing about their personal lives give us unforgettable snapshots of nine different times in our country's history.
Take this 15 year old Puritan girl
December 5, 1675.....I am fifteen years old to-day, and while sitting with my stitchery in my hand, there came a man in all wet with the salt spray, he having just landed by the boat from Sandwich, which had much ado to land by reason of the surf. I myself had been down to the shore and saw the great waves breaking, and the high tide running up as far as the hillocks of dead grass. The man George, an Indian, brings word of much sickness in Boston, and great trouble with the Quakers and Baptists; that many of the children throughout the country be not baptized, and without that religion comes to nothing. My mother hath bid me this day put on a fresh kirtle and wimple, though it be not the Lord's day, and my Aunt Alice coming in did chide me and say that to pay attention to a birthday was putting myself with the world's people. It happens from this that my kirtle and wimple are not longer pleasing to me, and what with this and the bad news from Boston my birthday has ended in sorrow.
Or Kate Dunlap, a young wife traveling overland to Montana by horse team.
May 15, 1864…The first emigrants saw hard times on account of bad roads, no grass and the great scarsity of hay. In the afternoon we drove on to Lewis, hoping to get hay but could not get any except we would put up bag and baggage at a hotel. We stopped at the Henderson House . I was relieved from cooking, it being the first time I had eaten at a table for two weeks...
May 18th …We arrived at Council Bluffs about 9 o'clock and the boys about 12 o'clock. We cant get across the river for several days. Hundreds of teams are waiting their turn, and frequently fights and confusion ensue. A sad accident happened to day. A little girl was josteled out of the wagon as it drove on to the ferry boat. was run over and killed. They had started from this place; They returned to bury their child.
Or Marianna Costa who organized textile workers, 1933.
...I didn't understand when the girls in the department I was in said, "We're going to go out." The chanting outside of the window, that's my first recollection. There was chanting outside of our work windows, and a big group of people. I guess they initially started by the Wideman plant. . . . and in Riverside you start in one place and you go down [and] you weave in and out. It's all dye plants. So that if you made your run you would call these people out and they would join in that line. And they'd go to the next plant and there was a bigger line. And the line kept getting bigger and bigger. The crowd instead of being one hundred was two hundred. Two hundred would get three hundred. By the time they got to our plant half the street was just a crowd of people. And they'd say, "Come on out. Join us. We're going to strike...
We are all witnesses to history and what we write about lives today can enrich and enlighten readers in the distant future.
Everyone has their life purpose.
Dan Freeman, aka the Barman, had a dream. Some would say an impossible one.
Until he retired, it was just a dream. Now, he's making it come true.
1000 bars in 1 year in New York City.
The rules are strict: no driving, only the subway or a bus, drink only at a bar, and only one drink.
With passion and flair, he's documenting his dream in A thousand bars.
A hundred years from now, people will marvel at this personal social history of that great city.
The Voice of America, as part of its American Life series, is playing a story about a hospice in central Iowa where staff members are helping patients prepare ethical wills to leave behind a spiritual, philosophical legacy.
Mr. Fry says most people have a desire to leave behind something more meaningful than material goods. "It may be those opportunities to share where it is we came from, what we're about, why we chose decisions that we chose or made decisions that we made throughout our lives. It's an opportunity to deal with regret and forgiveness."
Mr. Burkhart says the exercise has been therapeutic: "It has helped me tremendously and has given me satisfaction knowing that I have been able to express myself to my kids and my family, my parents, about how I feel and where I'm at."
Joel Fry at the Hospice of Central Iowa points out that one does not have to be an accomplished writer to compile an ethical will. It can start with a simple timeline, or a list. "Just number 1 through 30, the most important things in your life," he says. "There are individuals who'll sit in front of a movie camera. Many times I've had a movie camera going, and that's how they choose to do it."
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The hospice workers say one of their saddest experiences is watching patients rage against the steady loss of independence -- their homes, the freedom to drive, even their memories. All the more reason, say the staff members, that recording thoughts about life's lessons and blessings should not be a matter left till one's deathbed.
By 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem,' said Ian Pearson, one of Briain's leading futurologists to The Observer. 'If you're rich enough then by 2050 it's feasible. If you're poor you'll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when it's routine.
Pearson, 44, has formed his mind-boggling vision of the future after graduating in applied mathematics and theoretical physics, spending four years working in missile design and the past 20 years working in optical networks, broadband network evolution and cybernetics in BT's laboratories. He admits his prophecies are both 'very exciting' and 'very scary'.
He believes that today's youngsters may never have to die, and points to the rapid advances in computing power demonstrated last week, when Sony released the first details of its PlayStation 3. It is 35 times more powerful than previous games consoles. 'The new PlayStation is 1 per cent as powerful as a human brain,' he said. 'It is into supercomputer status compared to 10 years ago. PlayStation 5 will probably be as powerful as the human brain.'
Count me in as a big time skeptic of this chilling view of the future where the time to live and the time to die are one and the same.
Besides, I believe in editing. I'd rather have 20 favorite photos of a loved one than 2500. Their favorite songs, not every one they ever listened to. Their best thoughts and wise words, not every thought and every word.
That's why I believe people should take time and create just what they want to leave to the future as their personal legacy archives. It's not a data dump. It's a distillation of the best of your life.
UPDATE: It does sound like a Rapture for Nerds or as they say, the
Singularity
If you live through the SIngularity and you do not try UpLoading and are not rendered PostHumous by feral calculators or get eaten by GreyGoo, you may be one of the PostHumans. PostHumans are humans who are not human any more.
I sent in my RSVP and last weekend, I dropped into the Time Travelers Convention at MIT, but seeing no one I knew, left. Might go back though if I meet them later.
Personally, I prefer stories for time travel. What better way to travel to the past or insure a presence in the future than through really good stories?
My real reason for being at MIT was to learn more about the Work of Stories at the MIT Media in Transition conference. While there were some of the 200 presenters, I only stopped in on a few, those on digital storytelling, especially for families. I wanted to see how time travel via digital stories was doing. After all, digital storytelling -combining images and sound with a strong written narrative - is a new art form, accessible to anyone who can use standard computer tools. I think it's destined to be the preferred means of storytelling in the 21st century especially as internet savvy people grow older and begin to reflect on their lives and their stories as part of their legacy to their families.
J.D. Lasica writes about how the Center for Digital Storytelling helps people hold up a lens to their own lives. He quotes Joe Lambert who founded the Center.
"We sense that digital storytelling is beginning to spread like wildfire across the land," says Lambert, 45, who runs the 8-year-old center with his wife, Nina Mullen, plus a staff member and a posse of associates and technical volunteers. So far the non-profit project has trained more than 4,000 people in the use of digital media to tell meaningful stories from their lives.
I like Joe's first principle:
Every human has a powerful story to tell. You can not experience life without insights to your experience, which are valuable to a larger audience. Most people's perception of living a quiet, mundane, uninteresting, unmemorable life mask the vivid, complex and rich source of stories that everyone has to share.
I met Helen Barrett who's helping people with Electronic Portfolios especially in the field of education. She shares her ideas on her blog and most valuable is her guide to digital storytelling tools. Soon she'll be spending more time at Digital Family Story with her husband. Hopefully, she'll do some redecorating to the site which looks clunky and outdated but still has useful links around digital storytelling. I liked this older man's tribute to his Dad which nicely incorporates news footage and music from World War 2. The narrator, his voice almost breaking, as he talks about the last time he saw his father, demonstrates better than I could say, how important hearing a voice and a personal point of view is.
Another great list of resources and links can be found at digitalstories.org. I learned how much the BBC is doing in capturing stories of ordinary people in Wales. Called CaptureWales, the BBC site features ordinary people creating their stories at digital storytelling workshops around Wales with a new featured story each week.
For great stories there's always the favorite Fray where I found this amazing story of life and death about murder and carpet on the van walls, that you don't want to miss.
The only good paper I heard was by Barbara Audet at Auburn University who talked about the reinvention of the American scrapbook, this time with digital photographs and technology along with a more consciously crafted narrative. I never knew before that Mark Twain was such an ardent scrapbooker, making them and taking them wherever he went, and making money with his patented "self-pasting" scrapbook. PBS made an absolutely fabulous interactive scrapbook combining selections from his works, photos, illustration, clippings, and audio files.
The $2.5 billion scrapbooking industry in the US grew 28% in 2004 over 2001 according to this survey. How much faster will it grow when digital scrapbooks and stories really take hold? Take a look at Digital scrapbooks for lots of ideas.
UPDATE: Just came across time travel blog - back and forth to LA in 1947.
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Victoria Snelgrove was a college student celebrating the Red Sox pennant win outside Fenway Park last year when the crowd became unruly. Police moved in to control the crowd, one firing a pepper pellet control gun that hit Victoria in the eye killing her.
The City of Boston will be paying $5 million for her wrongful death in an out-of-court settlement. 'Heart wrenching" and "terrible" is how Police Commissioner Kathleen O'Toole describe the shooting and the impact of Victoria's death on her family.
Yesterday, the parents revealed that Victoria had made a videotape shortly before she died Her father describes it as a "gift", for her mother, it's still unbearable. Copies of the tape, along with remarks by her mourning family and friends were released on DVD yesterday by the family's lawyer.
All Victoria does is sit on her bed and talk passionately into the camera about her loving relationship with her family and her desire to become a broadcast journalist, all the while showing an awareness of the fragility of life and probably making the tape for just that reason.
"In a second, you know, my life or somebody close to me's life could just be taken away. So I try to take every opportunity and do everything and appreciate everything, even though it's hard sometime"
In the Boston Globe, Video of victim comforts, pains as family still grapples with loss
Mena Trott is one of the founders of Six Apart, the company that brings you Typepad and Moveable Type, this blog's platform. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Mena conducted by Shel Israel.
He's writing a book on Business Blogging with Robert Scobel, the famous blogger who put a human face on Microsoft. You can follow their progress and get an early look-see at The Red Couch.
I post it to show you how easily a blog can be used for your own Personal Legacy Archives, what you choose to leave to the future.
Sometimes just a detail can be the thread to lead you back to a memory. A photo and a few words may be all you need.
I post a picture of myself on a private weblog every day with my camera phone. I'm able to look back and see how I've changed over the year. People say it's the most egotistical thing, but it isn't, if only a few people read it. My mom loves it. She calls me up and tells me how she loved my hair on Wednesday and she knows I’m okay on days when I can’t call her. It’s valuable to me because I can look at every picture and tell you something about that day. I remember what I'm wearing, reflect on where I was at. It's the best way to capture individual days just by looking at the pictures. I can see the months fill up. I think web logging is almost a way to slow life down. At the end of the year, I'll probably post it publicly.
People did this. People kept journals all through history and it's important. As soon as you stop, keeping track of what you do, things go by too quickly. This is one of the things we like doing. I should write a post about it. Life slows down by posting everyday.
Here's a wonderful example of how good directions can make a great legacy.
Even while she lay dying from breast cancer in Wales, Helen Harcombe left instructions to her husband from raising her seven year old daughter, Ffion.
Here's some of Helen's to do list for her husband.
• Uniform bought every September. Check hair for nits regularly.
• Bath and hair every other night, AT LEAST. No child of mine to be smelly.
• Make sure you serve food with veg/peas. Get fruit down her. Don't let her live out of cans, noodles and toast etc.
• At Christmas time don't forget the smaller things like stocking fillers to make it look more and fill up the stocking - chocolates, bobbles, clips, make up, fun stuff etc.
• Bedding should be changed once a fortnight, more if sweaty.
• Flowers to me at least Mothers' Day, my birthday, Ffion's birthday, our anniversary, Christmas etc (in between would be nice!)
• Keep in touch witFi's godparents and my friends and especially Mam and Dad or ... I'll haunt you!
"It did bring a smile to a lot of people's faces and the pointers I am sure will be with us forever probably."
Ms Raybould said it was also important to have left something for Ffion. "It does show that even though her mother was going through a difficult illness, that the focus was on the family and on her," she said.
Jill Templeman, a family support team leader for Marie Curie Cancer Care in Wales, said the list was "a lovely and invaluable thing. We do encourage and try to support families to be open and prepare for death in lots of different ways with memory boxes and photo projects."
Cancer specialist Baroness Ilora Finlay, professor of palliative medicine and vice dean in the School of Medicine at Cardiff University, said Mrs Harcombe had left "a tremendous legacy".
"Helen died tragically young, leaving a young daughter and I really hope for her daughter that that list and that letter will become indeed more treasured with time," she said.
It's so great to read comments that point you to something that otherwise I never would have known. In one of my briefest posts, 1918 blogger, Tom Cunliffe of the Bright Field weblog points to his post, Our Hidden Lives , all about a movement in Britain during the 1940's called Mass Observation.
Ordinary people were encouraged to keep diaries over a period of years which were then collected, along with oral recordings as a sort of social archive of their times which has been preserved by the University of Sussex.
"Unputdownable" is how Tom describes a book - Our Hidden Lives - put together of several of the diarists. Why? These were just ordinary people who dealt with the aftermath of World War II in ordinary ways, by coping with the stuff of life -joy and sickness, financial worries and things particular to their time -food rationing and unemployment. But it's how people deal with the stuff of life that's so engrossing.
People never tire of hearing about the details of other lives - the smallest things, what they wore, what they ate, what they rode, what they saw and experienced, what they watched and read and were influenced by, what they thought, what they learned.
Imagine how your great grandchildren will appreciate the ordinary details of your life. That's the gift of personal legacy archives can keep on giving long after you are just a memory. Tom thinks that blogs can serve the same purpose of chronicling ordinary lives that those 1940s diaries did.
I do too. But I suggest that once a year, or more often, a detailed chronicle of a single day, however boring that might seem, will prove to be endlessly interesting a few decades or more into the future. We all are living extraordinary lives.
Betsy Devine found a personal legacy archives - her grandfather's letters. She excerpts from the a series of letters he wrote to his newborn grandson in 1918 .
HT Dave Weinberger at Joho the Blog
The trouble with my computer began when I tried to post twice about Ronni Bennett's piece on (Extra)ordinary Lives because it rang so true and she said it so well.
Now that I'm back online and brimming with posts, let me do this one first.
Let's say this all together now: No lives are ordinary.
Even if you “only” got married, raised children and tended the backyard garden, you have stories to tell. You especially have stories your children, grandchildren and beyond will care about. Everyone wants to know who and where they came from and what those people were like, how they lived, what they did. That’s why so many adoptees seek out their birth parents and why genealogy is popular: We all struggle to know ourselves and a large part of doing that is in knowing our family pasts.....
.....
What those people wanted to know was what a big-time movie star does with herself when she’s not making movies. That’s what the best entertainment profiles deliver - a peek into the celebrity’s private life...
...and it is also what your descendants will want to know about you. You are part of them; your blood flows in their veins; your genes will inform their appearance, behavior, perhaps even their interests and passions.
The smallest things can make interesting stories....
...
Your stories also become a record of life in general – modern to us now – that will, a generation or two hence, contain curiosities and puzzlements.
...
Everyone has dozens of stories, large and small, happy and sad, funny and painful, that shouldn’t be lost because you think your life is ordinary. It is not. Your stories will bring alive times past for your descendants and enrich their lives by knowing the family stories of their ancestors (that’s you someday).
So let’s say it together one more time: No lives are ordinary.
Everyone has wonderful stories. Everyone should have a personal legacy archives just brimming with personal and family stories. It's fun to do. It's how you can be creative. Think of your stories as presents you can give to the people you love and, at the same time, save them for posterity.
Want to know where your ancestors came from? Your family tree only go back so far. Now tracing your family lineage back 10,000 years is possible, amazing as that sounds.
IBM and the National Geographic have begun assembling a massive genetic database called the Genographic Project. You can participate in the project according to the Wall St Journal today in Project Hopes to Trace Your Ancestors Back 10,000 years (subscription only) and have your DNA analyzed for ancestral origins.
For $99.95, you may be able to see what path your ancestors took on their migration to their eventual home. The trick lies in persistent markers left in DNA from generation to generation.
If you want to participate, National Geographic will mail you a kit containing two swabs and a pair of plastic vials. You just scrape some cells off the inner wall of cheek, mail them back and start to check in on the Web to see just where you are in the human family tree and at the same time contribute to the sample.
It's being called a Landmark Study of the Human Journey. Here's the National Geographic site for The Genographic Project.
Thomas Lynch, a funeral director for 40 years has an amazing op ed piece in Sunday's New York Times, Our Near Death Experience.
For many bereaved Americans, the "celebration of life" involves a guest list open to everyone except the actual corpse, which is often dismissed, disappeared without rubric or witness, buried or burned, out of sight, out of mind, by paid functionaries like me. So the visible presence of the pope's body at the pope's wake and funeral strikes many as an oddity, a quaint relic.
[O]urs is a species that down the millenniums has learned to deal with death (the idea of the thing) by dealing with the dead (the thing itself) in all the flesh and frailty of the human condition. We process grief by processing the objects of our grief, the bodies of the dead, from one place to the next. .... We commit and commend them into the nothingness or somethingness, into the presence of God or God's absence. Whatever afterlife there is or isn't, human beings have marked their ceasing to be by going to the tomb or the fire or the grave, the holy tree or deep sea, whatever sacred space of oblivion to which we consign our dead. Humans have been doing this for 40,000 years.
I've been doing funerals for almost 40.
......
Late in the last century more homegrown doxologies became more popular. We boomers, vexed by the elder metaphors of grief and death, wanted to create our own. Everyone was into the available "choices."
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For many Americans, however, that wheel is not just broken but off track or in need of reinvention. The loosened ties of faith and family, of religious and ethnic identity, have left them ritually adrift, bereft of custom, symbol, metaphor and meaningful liturgy or language. ...
Many Americans are now spiritual tourists without home places or core beliefs to return to.
INSTEAD of dead Methodists or Muslims, we are now dead golfers or gardeners, bikers or bowlers. The bereaved are not so much family and friends or fellow believers as like-minded hobbyists or enthusiasts. And I have become less the funeral director and more the memorial caddy of sorts, getting the dead out of the way and the living assembled for a memorial "event" that is neither sacred nor secular but increasingly absurd - a triumph of accessories over essentials, stuff over substance, theme over theology. The genuine dead are downsized or disappeared or turned into knickknacks in a kind of funereal karaoke - bodiless obsequies where the finger food is good, the music transcendent, the talk determinedly "life affirming," the accouterments all purposefully cheering and inclusive and where someone can be counted on to declare "closure" just before the merlot runs out. We leave these events with the increasing sense that something is missing.
Something is.
Just as he showed us something about suffering and sickness and dying in his last days alive, in death Pope John Paul II showed us something about grieving and taking our leave. The good death, good grief, good funerals come from keeping the vigils, from bearing our burdens honorably, from honest witness and remembrance. They come from going the distance with the ones we love.
I think as boomers age, there's going to be a great new Awakening in this country. For all the narcissism and materialism of the 80s and 90s, the foundational experience of the generation was spiritual. By the time you hit your fifties, you're not so interested in the cutting edge, but the shape of the knife, then all the uses to which it can put, finally, its purpose. There's an enormous appetite for purpose and meaning. Boomers have spent countless hundreds of hours, in their college years and later, sitting stoned, talking about love and meaning. From middle-age, you don't care about bold and shocking, you want deep. I think there's going to be an extraordinary efflorescence of personal creativity, as boomers resort to digital tools to tell the stories of their lives.
Ronni Bennett calls them Stories for the Infinite Future in a must-read post how we ordinary people can create what only kings and queens could afford in the past.
I have left with the other papers my friend will need, a final blog to be posted. Yes, it begins with, “If you’re reading this, I am dead,” though I intend to update it every six months or so and I may be able, in time, to get more creative than that.
I’ve also left instructions to set aside money to pay my blog host for at least a year after I die, along with other instructions for downloading my blog onto CDs (or whatever storage medium has evolved by then) to give to anyone who cares to have it.
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Imagine if you had such a record from your grandparents, great grandparents and even further back what a gift that would be. Now it can be so into an infinite future.
Putting your digital assets in a form that can be used and enjoyed into the future not only benefits you in their creation by adding in a deeper way your meaning, your purpose but your descendants into the infinite future. That's what the Protected E-Vault is all about. It's because Legacy Matters.
He showed us how to live. He showed us how to die. On his deathbed, he said,
Do not weep. I am happy, and you should be as well, let us pray together with joy.
He even showed us how to leave a spiritual or ethical will, reviewed and revised over many years.
"Watch, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming" (cf. Matt 24:42) -- these words remind me of the last call, which will occur at the moment the Lord wills it. I want to follow Him and I want all that forms part of my earthly life to prepare me for this moment...
I thank all. I ask all for forgiveness. I also ask for prayer, so that God's Mercy will show itself greater than my weakness and unworthiness....
I do not leave behind me any property which will be necessary to dispose of. Insofar as the things of daily use that served me, I request that they be distributed as will seem opportune. My personal notes should be burned.....
After my death, I ask for Holy Masses and prayers ...
Today I only want to add this to it, that everyone should have present the prospect of death...
For full text, click continue reading.
John Paul II's Last Will and Testament
"I Hope That Christ Will Give Me the Grace for the Last Passage"
VATICAN CITY, APRIL 7, 2005 (Zenit.org).- Here is a translation of John Paul II's last will and testament, published today by the Holy See.
* * *
The Testament of 6.3.1979
(and the subsequent addition)
"Totus Tuus ego sum"
In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity. Amen.
"Watch, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming" (cf. Matt 24:42) -- these words remind me of the last call, which will occur at the moment the Lord wills it. I want to follow Him and I want all that forms part of my earthly life to prepare me for this moment. I do not know when it will occur, but like everything, I also place this moment in the hands of the Mother of my Master: 'Totus Tuus.' I leave everything in the same maternal hands, and all those who have been connected to my life and my vocation. Above all, I leave the Church in these hands, and also my Nation and the whole of humanity. I thank all. I ask all for forgiveness. I also ask for prayer, so that God's Mercy will show itself greater than my weakness and unworthiness.
During the Spiritual Exercises I reread the testament of the Holy Father Paul VI. This reading has led me to write the present testament.
I do not leave behind me any property which will be necessary to dispose of. Insofar as the things of daily use that served me, I request that they be distributed as will seem opportune. My personal notes should be burned. I request that Don Stanislaw watch over this, whom I thank for his very prolonged and comprehensive collaboration and help throughout the years. All other thanks instead I leave in my heart before God himself, because it is difficult to express them.
In regard to the funeral, I repeat the same dispositions which were given by the Holy Father Paul VI [here he notes on the margin: grave in the earth, not in a sarcophagus, 13.3.92].
"apud Dominum misericordia
et copiosa apud Eum redemptio"
John Paul pp. II
Rome, 6.III.1979
After my death, I ask for Holy Masses and prayers
5.III.1990
* * *
Undated sheet:
I express my profound trust that, despite all my weakness, the Lord will grant me every necessary grace to face, according to his will, any task, trial and suffering that he might require of His servant in the course of life. I also trust that he will never permit that, through some attitude of mine: words, works or omissions, I betray my obligations in this Holy Petrine See.
* * *
24.II -- 1.III.1980
Also during these Spiritual Exercises I reflected on the truth of the Priesthood of Christ in the perspective of that Transit that for each one of us is the moment of our own death. Eloquent sign [addition above: decisive] for us when taking leave of this world -- to be born in the other, the future world -- is the Resurrection of Christ.
I have read therefore the registration of my testament of last year, also made during the Spiritual Exercises -- I have compared it to the testament of my great Predecessor and Father Paul VI, with that sublime testimony on the death of a Christian and a Pope -- and I have renewed in myself the awareness of the questions, to which the registration of the 6.III.1979 refers, prepared by me (in a rather provisional way).
Today I only want to add this to it, that everyone should have present the prospect of death. And must be ready to present himself before the Lord and Judge -- and, contemporaneously, Redeemer and Father. I also take this into consideration continually, entrusting that decisive moment to the Mother of Christ and of the Church -- to the Mother of my hope.
The times, in which we live, are unspeakably difficult and disquieting. The way of the Church has also become difficult and tense, characteristic trial of these times -- both for the Faithful as well as for the Pastors. In some countries (as for example in the one I read about during the Spiritual Exercises), the Church finds herself in such a period of persecution that is not inferior to that of the first centuries, rather it exceeds them by the degree of ruthlessness and hatred. "Sanguis martyrum -- semen christianorum." And in addition to this -- so many people die innocently, also in this country in which we live ...
I desire once again to commend myself totally to the Lord's grace. He himself will decide when and how I must finish my earthly life and pastoral ministry. "Totus Tuus" through the Immaculate in life and in death. Accepting this death already now, I hope that Christ will give me the grace for the last passage, that is [my] Pasch. I hope that he will render it useful also for this most important cause which I seek to serve: the salvation of men, the safeguarding of the human family, and in it of all the nations and peoples (among them I also turn in a particular way to my earthly Homeland), useful for the persons he has entrusted to me in a particular way, for the issues of the Church, for the glory of God himself.
I do not wish to add anything to what I wrote a year ago -- only to express this readiness and contemporaneously this trust, to which the present Spiritual Exercises have again disposed me.
John Paul II
* * *
"Totus Tuus ego sum"
5.III.1982
In the course of this year's Spiritual Exercises I read (several times) the text of the testament of 6.III.1979. Although I still consider it as provisional (not definitive), I leave it in the form it exists. I do not change (for now) anything, nor do I add anything in regard to the dispositions contained in it.
The attempt on my life on 13.V.1981 in some way has confirmed the accuracy of the words written in the period of the Spiritual Exercises of 1980 (24.II -- 1.III)
I feel that much more profoundly that I am totally in God's Hands -- and I remain continually at the disposition of my Lord, entrusting myself to Him in His Immaculate Mother ("Totus Tuus")
John Paul II
* * *
5.III.82
In connection with the last phrase of my testament of 6.III 1979 (: "On the place/ the place, that is, of the funeral/ the College of Cardinals and my fellow countrymen should decide") -- I clarify what I have in mind: the Metropolitan of Krakow and the General Council of the Episcopate of Poland -- I request the College of Cardinals in the meantime to satisfy insofar as possible the eventual questions of its members.
* * *
1.III.1985 (in the course of the Spiritual Exercises).
Now -- in regard to the expression "College of Cardinals and my fellow countrymen": the "College of Cardinals" has no obligation to question "my fellow countrymen" on this argument; it can however do so, if for some reason it considers it legitimate.
JPII
The Spiritual Exercises of the Jubilee Year 2000
(12-18.III)
[for the testament]
1. When on the day of October 16, 1978, the conclave of Cardinals elected John Paul II, the Primate of Poland, Card. Stefan Wyszynski said to me: "The task of the new Pope will be to lead the Church into the Third Millennium." I do not know if I repeat the phrase exactly, but at least such was the sense of what he then felt. It was said by the Man who has passed into history as Primate of the Millennium. A great Primate. I was a witness of his mission, of his total trust. Of his struggles: of his victory. "Victory, when it occurs, will be a victory through Mary" -- these words of his Predecessor, Card. August Hlond, the Primate of the Millennium used to repeat.
In this way I was in some manner prepared for the task that the day October 16, 1978, presented before me. In the moment in which I write these words, Jubilee Year of 2000, it is already a reality in progress. The night of December 24, 1999, the symbolic Door of the Great Jubilee was opened in St. Peter's Basilica, later that of St. John Lateran, then of St. Mary Major -- on New Year's Day, and the day of January 19 the Door of the Basilica of St. Paul "Outside the Walls." This last event, because of its ecumenical character, has remained imprinted in my memory in a particular way.
2. As the Jubilee Year 2000 goes forward, from day to day the 20th century closes behind us and the 21st century opens. According to the plans of Providence, it was given to me to live in the difficult century that is going into the past, and now in the year in which the age of my life reaches eighty years ("octogesima adveniens"), one must ask oneself if it is not the time to repeat with the biblical Simeon "Nunc dimittis."
On the day of May 13, 1981, the day of the attempt on the Pope during the General Audience in St. Peter's Square, Divine Providence saved me in a miraculous way from death. He who is the sole Lord of life and death, He himself prolonged this life, in a certain way he has given it to me again. From this moment it again belongs even more to Him. I hope He will help me to recognize how long I must continue this service, to which he called me on the day of October 16, 1978. I ask him to call me when He himself wills it. "In life and in death we belong to the Lord ... we are the Lord's" (cf. Rm 14:8). I also hope that so long as it is given to me to carry out the Petrine service in the Church, the Mercy of God will give me the necessary strength for this service.
3. As every year during the Spiritual Exercises I have read my testament of 6.III.1979. I continue to hold the dispositions contained in it. That which now, and also during the subsequent Spiritual Exercises, has been added is a reflection of the difficult and tense general situation, which has marked the '80s. Since autumn of the year 1989 this situation has changed. The last decade of the last century was free from the preceding tensions; this does not mean that it did not bring with it new problems and difficulties. In a particular way may Divine Providence be praised for this, that the period of the so-called "Cold War" finished without violent nuclear conflict, which danger weighed on the world in the preceding period.
4. Being on the threshold of the Third Millennium "in medio Ecclesiae," I wish once again to express gratitude to the Holy Spirit for the great gift of Vatican Council II, to which together with the whole Church -- and above all with the entire episcopate -- I feel indebted. I am convinced that once again and for a long time it will be given to the new generations to draw from the riches that this Council of the 20th century has lavished. As a Bishop who has participated in the conciliar event from the first to the last day, I wish to entrust this great treasure to all those who are or will be in the future called to realize it. For my part, I thank the eternal Pastor who allowed me to serve this great cause in the course of all the years of my pontificate.
"In medio Ecclesiae" ... from the first years of episcopal service -- precisely thanks to the Council -- it was given to me to experience the fraternal communion of the Episcopate. As priest of the Archdiocese of Krakow I experienced the fraternal communion of the presbytery -- the Council opened a new dimension of this experience.
5. How many people I would have to list! The Lord has probably called the majority of them to himself -- as regards those who are still on this side, may the words of this testament remind them, all and everywhere, wherever they find themselves.
In the course of more than twenty years in which I have carried out the Petrine service "in medio Ecclesiae" I have experienced the benevolent and extremely fruitful collaboration of so many Cardinals, Archbishops and Bishops, so many priests, so many consecrated persons -- Brothers and Sisters -- in short, of so many lay persons, in the curial environment, in the Vicariate of the Diocese of Rome, as well as outside these environments.
How can I no willingly embrace all the Episcopates of the world, with which I met in the succession of visits "ad limina Apostolorum!" How can I not also remember so many Christian Brothers -- not Catholics! And the Rabbi of Rome and the numerous representatives of non-Christian religions! And the many representatives of the world of culture, science, politics, the means of social communications!
6. In the measure that the end of my earthly life approaches I return to the memory of the beginning, of my Parents, my Brother and my Sister (whom I did not know because she died before my birth), to the parish of Wadowice, where I was baptized, to that city of my love, of my contemporaries, girl and boy companions of elementary school, the junior high school, the university, until the times of the Occupation, when I worked as a laborer, and later on in the parish of Niegowic, Krakow's of St. Florian, to the pastoral care of academics, the environment ... to all environments ... to Krakow and to Rome ... to persons who in a special way were entrusted to me by the Lord.
To all I wish to say one thing: "May God reward you"
"In manus Tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum"
A.D.
17.III.2000
I've long advocated digital stories as one way to create your personal legacy archives.
See how The Center for Digital Storytelling promotes storytelling as a way to create a living memory woven of a thousand stories. Now Ourmedia.org has just begun a new way for grassroots media and storytellers to share their work and get noticed. And there's an RSS feed.
HT to Stephen Harlow at Only Connect.
She was a successful corporate warrior, yet at 48 she had yet to make a soup from scratch. That's when she found her grandmother's legacy, a soup pot, a note taped under the lid, a recipe and a love from the past that filled a nagging emptiness. Read A Good Day for Soup by Barbara Davey.
Think about the stories behind your possessions that you will one day pass on. I love the idea of writing a note or a letter to tuck inside only to be discovered years later. Will you pass on your stories as well as your stuff? Think about if. Your recipes may be more treasured than your china.
Dougie
My uncle Dougie
was killed
on Sword Beach,
the 6th of June,
nineteen hundred
and forty four.
The cadence
of the date
like a slow chant
in my father's mind
round the one
central memory
Dougie taught
him how to swim
before he died.
.............
Now I remember
my father's repeated
weekend need
for the ice cold waters
where he taught me
how to swim
and his fatherly
satisfaction
at the slowly
growing strokes
that kept his son
above water.
I could not know what
was being given then
not knowing
how as the years pass
we must always strike
boldly to save those close to us,
hold them
above the drowning water
with our words,
so they live again.
if not the man,
then the loved
memory.....
From The House of Belonging, poems by David Whyte
Joseph Cooper writes in the Christian Science Monitor about monuments to decent lives as he reflects on Presidents' Day. If you ever wondered whether the experiences of your life are worth passing on, listen to what Cooper says.
Let's face it, there are few Mount Rushmore lives.
Still, each of us, in our own way, carves out a bit of history that should be set down - for our own edification, and for each of our families and a few friends.
So, he's taken upon himself to write about himself for his son about those experiences in his life he wants his son to know. We all have had high shining moments in our lives that stay bright in our minds. We also all have had crushing disappointments and mistakes that sometimes turn out to have directed us on to a better path. I think that what we think of some of the moments our lives will turn out to be a treasure for those generations that follow us. It's the stories of our lives that are worth saving.
Here's more of what Cooper wants to tell, memorialize and save for his son.
I have only one constituent - a son. Without fanfare, I have inaugurated my own campaign, not just for approval ratings but to pass down a bit of my history - a sense of the little moments that made big impressions, and are housed in my mental archives.
I want my son to know how I felt when:
• As a Little Leaguer, inexplicably, I struck out with consistency.
• As a Babe Ruth sub, I once got a walk and, miraculously, stole second and third.
• As a college freshman, with my father in the stands, I ran a distant fourth in the 100-yard dash, having stayed up the night before to participate in fraternity pledge inanity.
• As an ROTC cadet, I experienced abject fear crawling under barbed wire with machine-gun fire spraying that sector at Indiantown Gap Military Reservation; I endured slurs and condemnations as I walked to and from Ivy League classrooms every Thursday; and I was conflicted when officially advised that I was medically unusable in the jungles of Vietnam.
• As an infantry reject about to enter law school, I saw a college track teammate return to campus in uniform, medals thick on his chest, taking big strides on crutches, and with a trouser leg shortened to above the knee.
• As an infantry reject who had just entered law school, I learned of my ROTC company commander's death in action in Vietnam.
• As a law student, I learned to be cynical about the law and lawyers.
• As a political volunteer, I learned to be cynical about politics and politicians.
• As a teacher, I learned to be cynical about public education.
• As an underemployed public relations writer, I learned about job searches and became cynical about human-resource professionals and economic recovery.
• As a writer of personal essays, I learned that my cynicism was not helpful, and that more could be conveyed by working through disappointments, by purging resentments, and by trying to understand and explain how good things come about.
He also points out, writing these down doesn't require a book-length memoir, nor are they written in stone. You can always rewrite and revise. The point is to begin. You begin where you are. Start with notes on your computer, polish them up and give one or more stories to your children on their birthdays.
Hat tip to Christopher Bailey at the Alchemy of Soulful Work who writes after reading Cooper's essay.
I immediately thought of my two daughters. There will be times in their growing lives that they will wonder who their father was: what he saw that amazed him, what he experienced that influenced him, and he did that made a difference. And there's room to include the less than perfect moments that taught hard lessons.
This isn't an exercise that needs to be put off for when we reach a certain age. Consider it an organic document, one that lives to be added on to.
Fran known as the redondowriter has another one of her "Ancestor Deck Cards" up, this one for her grandma Grace.
This is an example of the creative art anyone can do. It's scrapbooking made digital to preserve in your personal and family archives. It's using the present to preserve the past and pass on the future.
Josephine...
Napoleon Bonaparte
Oh, I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy.
(Spoken to her husband of 9 months, Rev. Arthur Nicholls.)
Charlotte Bronte, writer, d. 1855
Beautiful.
(In reply to her husband who had asked how she felt.)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, writer, d. 1861
I love you Sarah. For all eternity, I love you.
(Spoken to his wife.)
James K. Polk, US President, d. 1849
Thanks Corsinet
Here's to my love! O true apothecary!
Thy drugs are quick. Thus with a kiss I die.
Romeo in Romeo and Juliet by William Shakepeare
Yea noise? then I'll be brief. O happy dagger!
This is thy sheath; there rust, and let me die.
Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare,
David Pogue who writes a weekly column in Circuits of the New York Times also writes a weekly newsletter a
and by far, his most popular subject is how to Rescue Old, Outdated Media. Here from his newsletter are some links that might be helpful to you as you create and maintain your personal and family legacy archives.
TRANSFERRING AUDIO TAPES TO CD:
If you have a Windows PC:
http://www.g4techtv.com/callforhelp/features/22210/Transfer_Tape_to_CD.html>
If you have a Mac, here are a couple of different approaches:
http://www.wap.org/journal/digitizingcassettes/default.html
http://lowendmac.com/lab/03/0814.html
TRANSFERRING VINYL RECORDS TO CD: Take your pick of free tutorials:
http://www.thelaughingpapillon.com/vinyl2cd.php
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=387506
http://www.cyberwalker.net/columns/feb02/150202.html
http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,46164,00.asp
TRANSFERRING VHS (AND OTHER ANALOG) VIDEOS TO DVD:
Here are several sets of instructions, all variations on the theme.
They're here for Windows: http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,97624,00.asp
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3000_7-5071953-1.html . . . .
and here for the Mac:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=91153
http://www.macworld.com/2004/05/features/fromvhstodvd/index.php
TRANSFERRING OLD FILM TO DVD: This one's not so easy. There is such a thing as a mirrored apparatus that lets you play your old films from a projector directly into a modern camcorder, but it's a royal pain, it's time-consuming and the resulting quality isn't so great. That's why most experts concede defeat on this one and recommend that you send your reels off to a commercial transfer service. That's the conclusion by this online columnist, for example, which includes links to several such transfer companies (which I haven't tested):
http://channels.lockergnome.com/windows/archives/
One of the more familiar phrases we hear during Lent is "ashes to ashes, dust to dust." I always thought it came from the Bible until I learned from Ken Collins that the phrase comes from the funeral service of the Book of Common Prayer. Wherever it comes from, ashes to ashes, dust to dust reminds us that life is short.
Ivan Noble had a short life and died at 37 early this month but not without leaving behind a Great Legacy.
Ivan was a BBC journalist who was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor in 2002. What he decided to do with this terrible twist of fate was to write about it online in a blog he called "Tumor Diary." As the BBC reported that his blog was read by 100,000 people a day
He movingly described his odyssey of chemotherapy and brain surgery, his marriage, the birth of a baby son last year, and a surge of hope -- quickly dashed -- that the brain tumour was in retreat.
But in a final posting on Thursday, Noble wrote: "This is my last diary. I have written it ahead of time because I knew there would be a point when I was not well enough to continue.
"That time has now come."
In an appreciation of Ivan, his colleague Simon Fraser wrote
Ivan felt his main achievement against cancer was that he didn't surrender to fear.
Sure, he had many low points along the way. But, somehow, he kept going, kept his dignity and learnt to get something out of just about every day.
A sense of humour was never far away
When Ivan was first told he had a tumour, his daughter was just six months old. He was days away from going part-time at work to help care for her. Illness changed the kind of father he could be. Balancing his needs with those of a young family was desperately hard, but his children gave him enormous delight. Ivan died having done much to promote awareness of cancer. He was hugely proud that his diaries would be published as a book. ....Ivan died surrounded by love from his wife and children, his parents, brother and friends.....
He kept winning a little bit every day, because he managed to conquer fear.
Ivan made something good out of bad, responded with strength to a situation in which he seemed powerless, with gratefulness to his medical team and his colleagues at the BBC and with overarching love for his family including a new baby. By sharing his journey with tens of thousands online, he heartened other cancer patients and helped them deal better with their own personal struggles and triumphs. By writing, he created a lasting legacy.
In the end Ivan proved he deserved his name. He was truly Noble. Requiescat In Pace.
William Albert Kenyon was born about 3 months prematurely, weighing slightly more than one pound last October. His parents John and Mary Kenyon started a blog to tell the story of their very little boy, to understand better neonatal care and to educate people about pre-eclampsia, the pregnancy-induced hypertension that occurs in about 8% of all pregnancies.
Sadly William died on January 22, 2005 after 3 months spent in neonatal care at the University of Iowa Hospital despite the expert and loving care of his medical team and the great, big love of his parents who said about their son.
Will was a strong fighter, fending off numerous challenges. He liked to hold his hands next to his face and chin. He was most comfortable lying on his tummy. He had a strong grip when offered a finger to hold. A parental hand cupping the top of his head kept him calm and comfortable. Sometimes he tapped his feet as if hearing music in his head. He was soothed listening to a lullaby CD and hearing his parents read stories, especially Goodnight Moon, Two Little Trains, and Jamberry.
What they have done is create a family legacy archive about young Will they will treasure forever, even if and I hope do, have many children. Will's young life and his fighting spirit will affect others for many years to come because his parents transformed a tragedy to a great legacy by documenting his life, their feelings and sharing with us all at willkenyon.blogspot,com.
As with most things in my life, I made meticulous plans about how we would prepare for his arrival and what we'd do once he was here. I signed up for childbirth, parenting, and breastfeeding classes. I read all I could about cribs, car seats, and strollers. I planted tulips and daffodils that would come up just as we were ready to venture out after spending a few weeks inside getting used to each other.
Will's early arrival turned all my plans on end and forced me to focus on each single day. No planning. No long views. Just each day, each hour, sometimes each minute. I never had any idea what was coming next and had to brace myself for each new emotion as it washed over me. Joy. Pain. Fear. Anxiety. Impatience. Confusion. Triumph. Defeat. Love. Love. Love. Will gave me the gift of time. The only thing that mattered during those 12 weeks and four days was how many hours I could spend at his bedside before collapsing into sleep in my own bed back home.
Great tutorial by Mike Matas on how to make a life poster like this. He did it in about 30 minutes and the poster cost $29. If you don't have iPhoto it might take longer. What a great gift.
Last Sunday in New York City, two separate fires took the lives of three firemen. Two of them were forced to choose between jumping for their lives or burning to death. Four are still fighting for their lives. Families are bereft and children are fatherless after the worst tragedy for the NYC fire department since September 11.
Yesterday, 10,000 mourners braved the bitter cold to turn out for the funeral of John Bellew. His widow Eileen read a Letter to God that so moved the crowded church that they stood and applauded. She worried that her four very young children would never really know their father.
"Eileen, and all of us, want the children to have a legacy. Anything. Notes, pictures, letters. Anything that will tell them who their dad really was," said brother Danny Bellew
FDNY Battalion Chief promised to keep the memory of John Bellew alive for his children with stories and pictures. Msgr Jack O'Keefe whose father was a firefighter killed in the line of duty gave the eulogy. He said he was raised by the NYC Fire Department and firefighters would give him stories about dad for decades. Clearly, he expected the firefighters to do no less for the Bellew children.
For those of you not part of such a brotherhood, please consider writing each of your children a letter every year on the birthday telling them that you love them and why you are proud of them. Consider too building your own personal legacy archives about yourself, the people you love, the music you love, the books you love, the things you love. Tell who you really are.
"Too much has been said about Auschwitz -- and yet not enough" writes Adam Zagajewski in today's Wall Street Journal. (link requires subscription)
For somebody who, like the present writer, lives in Krakow, only 40 miles from Auschwitz, it's certainly not an academic, abstract matter. The camp exerts a special attraction for all kinds of tourists, some of them shallow, some not, but who'd criticize it -- to have this place abandoned and forgotten (or perhaps "recycled") would have been truly disheartening. The modest city of Oswiecim lives next to the camp museum, not unlike the provincial city of Chartres dwarfed by its cathedral. The huge difference being of course that the Auschwitz monument is one of suffering and horror, it is a negative cathedral, so to speak; no spires greet the pilgrims from afar, we're in a flat landscape here. This is not an architectural landmark. Memory is not visible. We're here in the shabbiest museum of the world.
Still, the memory of Auschwitz and the other death camps lives on in the writings of survivors even as they are dying the natural deaths of old age. Eamonn Fitzgerald over at Rainy Day believes in Remembering to not forget.
What was it like to experience the unimaginable? Rainy Day recommends If This Is a Man, Primo Levi's account of the time he spent as a prisoner at Auschwitz. After reading Levi, one understands why some people would want to deny the Holocaust. The wickedness involved defies comprehension and suggests that "civilization" is but a veneer, and a thin one at that.
For the rest of the week, in remembrance of the liberation of Auschwitz, Rainy Day will be presenting diary entries written during the Second World War by those who were either caught up in the Nazi murder machine or by those who oiled it. We begin with an example of the latter. Why? Well, in the last few years Germany has witnessed a return of a specious 1950s theory that presents the perpetrators as victims. Actually, in this revisionist scenario the enablers of Auschwitz are double victims, first of Hitler the Great Seducer, and secondly of the Allied air campaign that destroyed the supply chains that filled the railway cars that delivered the men, women and children from all over Europe to the death factories.
Yesterday, a diary excerpt from Josef Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda; today, diary excerpts from Edith Velmans who escaped the death camps by hiding with a Christian family for three years. An immigrant to the U.S. she published her diary, Edith's Book, in 1998, about how she survived the war.
Reading these diary excerpts Eamonn presents gives you such a picture of those times through the accumulation of small details that you begin to understand the power of being your own personal historian. Any single day of your life if laid out with detail will be fascinating in 50 years time. God forbid that you ever must endure such horrors.
What do the following have in common?
slamming down a phone,
the pop of flashbulbs,
the clickety-clack of typewriters,
the jackpot sound of cascading coins,
the ka-ching of cash registers,
the screech of a phonograph needle,
the clatter of home movie projectors
You don't hear them anymore in our increasing digital age. These sounds are becoming obsolete, except in our memories if you are of a certain age. But they are not forgotten. At least not by Dan Sheehy whose job is to preserve America's acoustic heritage for the Smithsonian Institution. Sheehy says sounds are like smells. They can transport the listener to another time and place. Such is the emotional power of vintage sounds that a cell phone ring tone that mimics an old-fashioned rotary phone is the most popular ring tones offered by Valentino Production Music, the nation's oldest sound-effects warehouse. Full story by Roy Rivenburg of the Los Angeles Times
It makes you think about what sounds you might want to capture and preserve. Your grandbaby's gurgles, your son's laughter, the commotion of everyone getting out the door on a school day. Pick one day and be a sound gatherer in your own life. You'll be delighted with it in 10 years.
What do the following have in common?
slamming down a phone,
the pop of flashbulbs,
the clickety-clack of typewriters,
the jackpot sound of cascading coins,
the ka-ching of cash registers,
the screech of a phonograph needle,
the clatter of home movie projectors?
You don't hear them anymore in our increasing digital age. These sounds are becoming obsolete, except in our memories if you are of a certain age. But they are not forgotten. At least not by Dan Sheehy whose job is to preserve America's acoustic heritage for the Smithsonian Institution. Sheehy says sounds are like smells. They can transport the listener to another time and place. Such is the emotional power of vintage sounds that a cell phone ring tone that mimics an old-fashioned rotary phone is the most popular ring tones offered by Valentino Production Music, the nation's oldest sound-effects warehouse. Full story by Roy Rivenburg of the Los Angeles Times
It makes you think about what sounds you might want to capture and preserve. Your grandbaby's gurgles, your son's laughter, the commotion of everyone getting out the door on a school day. Pick one day and be a sound gatherer in your own life. You'll be delighted with it in 10 years.
Are you one of those people whose life story could be told through your T-shirts? Where you've been, the concerts you attended, the schools you went to, the slogans you live by, or used to?
Michael Prager in the Boston Globe today has found a company -StitchT.com - that will make
quilts and duvet covers from used T-shirts, honoring a venerable craft while serving a modern impulse: to use what exists instead of throwing away and using more. Each shirt is screened for holes and blemishes and laundered before assemblage on a backing of cotton gray sweatshirt material (new!) or cotton gray fabric. They'll make a quilt out of your shirts, or you can buy one they've already assembled; each is one of a kind. Prices range from $300 to $450
For a twin-size, you need 18 t-shirts, for a full or queen 25 t-shirts will do. Don't have enough? Let the company hand pick from their resources, theme-related t-shirts to meet the requirement. A wonderful take on two American classics.
Gilead is the long awaited second novel by Marilynne Robinson who wrote the modern classic "Housekeeping" in 1981. It's a work of solemn beauty and dry humor.
Gilead is in the form of a letter from an ailing Ames, a third generation pastor in a small Iowa town to his young son and a remarkable example of a what a personal legacy archive can be. Yes, it's fiction and by one of our most celebrated writers, but she tells stories of fathers and sons, of visions and intensely charged moments of love and life that we all experience from time to time. What a treasure to be able to pass on even some of them.
Here's an ordinary moment captured.
I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst. So I looked down at the yard and there you were, you and your mother, blowing bubbles at the cat, such a barrage of them that the poor beast was beside herself at the glut of opportunity. She was actually leaping in the air, our insouciant Soapy! Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavors. They were very lovely. Your mother is wearing her blue dress and you are wearing your red shirt and you were kneeling on the ground together with Soapy between and that effulgence of bubbles rising, and so much laughter. Ah, this life, this world.
In later years, can this boy ever doubt the love of his father and the beauty he saw in his son's very being.
How many of us can remember a certain moment with vivid recall and never really understand why.
I can't tell you what that day in the rain has meant to me. I can't tell myself what it has meant to me. But I know how many things it put together beyond question, for me. Now all the old woemn have their hair cut short and colored blue, which is fine, I suppose.
When someone dies, nothing pleases family members more than then hearing about the positive impact the deceased had on someone's life. Please take the time to write a note. The stories and appreciation you can express are enormously healing for their families. Whether hand-written or e-mail, grieving family members can read and re-read notes in their home time and feel the support of all those who knew and loved the deceased. Think of such a community as many invisible bonds forming a life-raft of love keeping the widow and children safe as they pass through the rapids and whirlpools of grief.
There is an online Fallen Heroes Memorial for all of the fallen service members of Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. If you wanted to know what you could do to support our troops, here's what you can. Send an expression of support, appreciation and gratitude to a family in your state.
Just released is Tarnation by Jonathan Caoutte, a documentary about living with his schizophrenic mother. It was made for $218 on a MacIntosh computer and edited with the iMovie software that came free with the computer. Roger Ebert says It is a remarkable film, immediate, urgent, angry, poetic and stubbornly hopeful. It has been constructed from the materials of a lifetime: Old home movies, answering machine tapes, letters and telegrams, photographs, clippings, new video footage, recent interviews and printed titles that summarize and explain Jonathan's life. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," T.S. Eliot wrote in "The Waste Land," and Caouette does the same thing.
I haven't seen it yet, but I plan to. It's a prime example of the creativity that lies in all of us as we try to make sense of our lives. Luckily we have the resources in the effluvia of our lives and the means with the easy accessibility of digital tools to create our works of art from our own lives. Ebert wonders whether a new type documentary is coming into being as we record the experience of our lives. I think so.
I'm one of those that believes in Christmas but decries much of the materialism that surrounds it. While I understand that many people earn their livings in creating and selling products for Christmas, just how many scarves and soaps on a rope is more than enough?
Why not plumb your memory to create a meaningful story for the people you love. The beauty of the digital world is that you can create something and give it away while keeping a perfect copy for yourself. This is the way to increase their personal and family archives as well as your own.
I've just discovered Foundation for a Better Life which I write about in my Business of Life blog. There is a section of stories that you could well use as examples. Take the featured story about a sister's wedding called Class and Grace or a son appreciating his mother in Ambition or the story of an aunt in Character. (These stories don't have permalinks so click on the bar on the bottom. )
Or you can pull out some of your old family photos and tell a short story to send to all your relatives. They most likely don't have digital copies of the old photos and will really appreciate not only the photo but also your take on it or your story. I've written about this earlier in Your Take on Family Photographs.
Ronni Bennett does this beautifully in Little Ronni, Ronni and Mommy, Army Air Corps Daddy, Great Grandma and Ronni and Daddy and Mommy. She's developed a few rules for herself because she originally published them on a photolog that provide some good guidelines in telling a good story.
1. I limited myself to one photo per day (many fotologgers publish
several a day) to give me the leisure to consider/ponder that
moment/person/episode in my life. And some took on new meaning for me,
as readers left comments, that I wanted to think over.
2. Captions had to reveal something more interesting than names, places
and dates.
3. Captions had to tell a whole story with a beginning, middle and end.
4. Captions were limited to no more than six published lines - it was on
a PHOTOlog after all, not a weblog. But this sharpened my thinking and
writing and I think it is more successful than if I hadn't made this
rule. I stuck to for all but about half a dozen photos.
5. Captions and photos could not harm or embarrass the people in the
photos (it was and is public, so that was important. Private collections
wouldn't need to be bound by this. I had to leave out a ton of great
stories to stick to this rule ;-)
6. Unless the subject of a photo is a publicly-recognized person, only
first names were used, but those names are real. I violated that a
couple of times, but for a good reason and to no consequence.
7. Within the limits of fallible memory, the captions had to be
emotionally honest and factually true
8. Above all, it had to entertain.
Gift of a Lifetime - what a wonderful phrase to describe your personal legacy archives.
Many more people are realizing that there is more to leave behind than money, more of value in your life than your valuables. Now's the time to capture the stories of your parents if you haven't already. The one regret of Robert DeNiro is that he didn't, When a parent dies, it's the end. I always wanted to chronicle the family history with my mother. I know she would've gotten into it. It would have been okay with my father, too. But I wasn't forceful, and I didn't make it happen. That's one regret I have. I didn't get as much of the family history as I could have for the kids.
Carolyn See who wrote "Gift of a Lifetime" for the AARP magazine captures the story of Maureen Evans Before her mother died last year, Maureen Evans hastily began writing down the stories she told her about her life. "I captured something that otherwise would have been lost," says Evans, who works for a nonprofit in public education advocacy in Washington, D.C. Inspired, she began to write down her own stories for her four children and any grandchildren she may have. "I wanted to make sure that they didn't get lost in the chaos of day-to-day life," she says.
The first step is capturing your parents stories, the second step is writing your own. As Ellen Goodman said
This packrat has learned that what the next generation will value most is not what we owned, but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we loved. In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage.
The story of your life is not just a recital of facts and events, it's the story of your choices, turning points, values and lessons learned and hopes for the future. Maureen Evans knew that and so she set out to write an ethical will. "My money is important," she says, "but it isn't the be-all, end-all of what I want to give my kids."
An ethical will is an important part of your Personal Legacy Archives and some say its injecting heart into the estate-planning field, according to Carolyn See who wrote Gift of a Lifetime for the AARP magazine. But don't think of it as something only those at the end of life do. It's an important way to reflect on the many selves you are and have been. It also isn't a one-off, something you do all at once. You can do it that way of course, but you will probably want to use the services of a professional to help you like Susan Turnbull at your ethical will That's why I prefer the term Personal Legacy Archives. You start where you are, and add periodically throughout your life to your legacy account. Then you won't have the regret Joan Didion expressed, “We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget; we forget what we whispered and what we dreamed; we forget who we were”
On his recent book tour before a crowd of booksellers in Chicago.
"I really think that anyone who is fortunate enough to live to 50 years old should take some time, even if it's just a couple of weekends, to sit down and write the story of your life, even if its only 20 pages, and even if its only for your children and grandchildren."
Waxing on Montaigne, John Burns in Straight Talk Goes Unbent Through Time's Prism. ponders how his children will remember him as he remembers his father in law. My father-in-law often speaks to Joan and me, though he has been gone for years. He was an inveterate writer of letters, composer of sermons and maker of notes. Even in the small things he left a record.
We still find his words, written in tiny, careful script on the backs of photographs, taped to the objects he left us and in the boxes of papers that remain. It's as if he's found a way to pop up and say hello now and then. In a dusty album there's a photograph of three little boys and their pet, circa 1911, when he was 9 years old. On the back of the photo, he'd written, in a child's hand, "Theodore, Ridgeway, me and the dog." At the bottom of a shoe box I found a snapshot of him 65 years later, with two little children -- my children. The three of them are staring at an overgrown shrub. On the back of the snapshot he'd written, "Teddy and Susannah and I search for raspberries, 1976."
Burns dips into Montaigne after 40 years, "in aching awareness of time passing." "I have had no thought of serving either you or my own glory," Montaigne writes in an introductory note to the reader. His sole aim is to reveal himself honestly to his family and friends, "so that when they have lost me (as soon they must), they may recover here some features of my habits and temperament, and by this means keep the knowledge they have had of me more complete and alive." In these few words he's suggested to me what I must do.
Montaigne writes about anything he pleases, large or small. He writes Of Smells; Of Prayers; Of The Art of Discussion; Of Cannibals; Of Glory. On and on he goes, to speak of women, thumbs, nakedness, cripples, liars and books. These topics don't seem to have been part of a grand design -- he appears to have just sat down and written about them as he felt the urge. Montaigne considers topics at his own pace; circles around them, pokes at them, goes where his curiosity leads.
The wonderful and various diversity of cultures in America, now more like a salad bowl than a melting pot, offers us many piquant customs, we could do well to adopt and remix to our own tastes. One of those is Dios de los Muertos, a Mexican holiday that mingles the Aztec culture and Catholicism.
It's estimated that the Aztecs ritually sacrificed about 20,000 people a year. Still, their belief that the souls of the departed remained on earth in the form of butterflies and birds is a charming one. So with the return of the Monarch butterflies, who migrate to Mexico for the winter, the souls of the departed are welcomed home.
Ancient Celts often sacrificed animals and humans at this time of year to free the imprisoned souls of sinners. They believed that evil spirits roamed the word, eager to do mischief or worse on the eve of their new year on October 31. To trick them, they would dress up as a ghost or a witch to fool the evil spirits and get through the night safely and so began Halloween. The Celtic custom was to extinguish all hearth fires then gather at a sacred grove where Druid priests would build a bonfire to welcome back dead ancestors. After dancing around the bonfire to frighten away the spirites, people would return home with lighted torches to ceremonially light the first hearth fire of the new year and exchange tales and ghost stories of their encounters with the spirit world.
Celtic Catholicism transformed many of the druid practices and November 1 became the Feast of All Saints and November 2, the Feast of All Souls. These two customs mixed in Mexico as the Dios de los Muertos and we can remix again to remember and welcome back memories of our beloved dead. Just how can be seen in Sacred Ordinary as 16 year old Anthony remember remembers his grandfather. 
and Fran remembers her grandfather 
Just another way of creating and adding to our family archives.
One way to enhance and enlarge your family legacy is to add your comments, musings and reflections to old family photographs. James Lileks does this masterfully in Grandma's Camera. Pedro Meyer is a professional photographer using all his art and skill to remember his parents in I Photograph to Remember
Ronni Bennett, a wonderful blogger at Time Goes By is like the rest of us, only further ahead in creating and sharing her personal legacy archives. She had posted photographs on a photo site that became "too hinky to rely on" so she's reposting bit by bit on her blog. There's Baby Ronni in her bath on the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Today, there's Daddy and Mommy, a wedding photograph with Ronni's comment that adds an altogether different context.
Her eleven-part series A Mother's Final, Best Lesson is a wonderful, moving depiction of the last days of a beloved parent.
Creating a personal and family archives roots us more firmly in the stream of life, connecting us to the past and the future. Or as Winston Churchill said, “The further backwards you look, the further forward you can see.”
When children are young, they are natural artists. Their fresh and open artistic expressions delight their parents and grandparents. Millions of refridgerators bear witness to their artistic creations. Sadly, as children grow older, their artistic drives dwindle and their creations fade and are thrown away. Some parents are determined to preserve their children's art. Some of the many ways they've found to do so are detailed in today's Wall Street Journal's Family Matters column by Hilary Stout, entitled Garden Gnomes Video Art.
There's the three-ring binder method, keeping all drawings organized by month in divider pockets and, at the end of the year, letting the child choose the ones they want to keep. Or, professionally matting and framing the very best. My favorite though is video art:
Jon Kies of San Jose, Calif., is a father of three and a self-described antipack rat. But still, he was torn about what to save and what to part with. To figure out what was most meaningful, he put his kids (then in preschool through third grade) in front of a video camera along with paper bags filled with their work. With the camera rolling, he interviewed the kids about each creation. "Often, when they started talking about it, they remembered much more than just the artwork -- kids who they worked with, issues about making it, and insightful remembrances about when they made it," he wrote. That made the decision of what to keep much easier.
For instance, Trevor, now 10 years old, explained that a drawing that was labeled chicken was actually chicken adobo, which is his Filipino grandfather's specialty and is one of the kids' favorite foods. A paper candle, a remnant of a classroom birthday celebration, prompted Trevor and sister Alyssa to break into a song.
And it turns out getting the kids on video in a spontaneous performance of "Mixing up the batter on the birthday cake" -- complete with the accompanying motions -- created a priceless piece of art unto itself.
I've found the paintings of artist Mark Rothko spiritual and very moving which is why he is one of my favorite modern artists. He committed suicide when he was 66 leaving behind two children and a wife who died 6 months later of a heart attack. Orphans, the children were involved for the next 12 years in legal battles involving the executors of the estate and the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan that resulted in the removal of the executors and millions of dollars in fines against the Galley. Then came the battles with the IRS over the value of the paintings which had greatly appreciated since the artist's death. In 1988 in a file marked miscellaneous papers, a manuscript by the artist was found. Christopher Rothko, the artist's son, spent more than a year editing the manuscript which has just been published by the Yale University Press as "The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art."
Christopher Rothko describes, the effect working on the manuscript had on him in today's New York Times:
Still, the son was unprepared for how intimate the process became. "I found myself having this strangely personal, sort of collegial relationship with my father that I hadn't anticipated," Mr. Rothko said. "It's like having a conversation with him." He added, "I think that underneath, I must have known that here was a way to have a relationship with my father that was unique."
For Christopher Rothko, the work also functions as a metaphorical family album. "I think the most concrete thing about my father in my life is his absence," he said. "You know, I've got a few Polaroids that are fading and that's kind of it.
"There are these paintings that speak so much - and yet so abstractly," Mr. Rothko said. "This is still a philosophical text, this ain't no kiss and tell, but I hear his voice, I see the manuscript page, and his handwriting, and the cross-outs and the rethinking and the sketching in. It was a fascinating process. In rediscovering the book, I rediscovered my father."
Indeed, for the first time since he was a young child, Christopher suddenly found himself calling his father dad.
"I'd be trying to sort through something," he said, "and he'd just have written the most convoluted sentence known to mankind, and it's like, 'Oh Dad, come on.' Believe me, it shocked me - I'd never had a second-person utterance in his direction since I was 6 years old, but here I was addressing a ghost. But it wasn't a ghost, because he was in my hands in some strange way."
In The Kaitlyn Mae Book " A grandmother writes of current events, her own history, life's lessons and all she wants to pass on to her beloved granddaughter"
Hurrah! From deviled eggs to political commentary. Let's get more women like her to write for their grandchildren and for the rest of us. We need more new, ideosyncratic and older voices on the net, who are creating personal legacy archives to show how it can be done.
Through her books, Fallaci says she hopes "to die a little less when I die. To leave the children I did not have... . To make people think a little more, outside the dogmas that this society has nourished us with through centuries. To give stories and ideas that help people to see better, to think better, to know a little more. Then what? Writing is my way of expression. Therefore, a need."
Kevin Salwen at Worthwhile says the most important thing we pass on to our children are our values on his way to link to a story that would make any parent proud in a blog entry titled Values 101
If so, how do parents memorialize their values. Too many people leave behind scads of datebooks and calendars, so we know the facts of their lives. Unless you have a writer in residence who observes you closely and writes what you think, people will know only the facts. Ethical Wills and Personal Legacy Statements are filling the niche of how to memorialize values and express the sense and sensibility of a person.
For more than a fleeting impression, values must be lived. For a lasting impression, values must be memorialized. In the past, families had mottos and crests and stories about the values they were most proud of. That privilege no longer is one of just aristocratic and very wealthy families. Any one with the desire and intention now can create ethical wills and family stories with the wonderful array of digital tools now available and using old home movies and photos and music.
The NYT Circuits features the growing industry of companies who do just that. For Neglected Video, the Hollywood Touch
Carolyn Alexander got into the business three years ago, when she bought Family Memories Video (familymemoriesvideo .com) based on the growth potential she saw. The enterprise, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., seemed more solid to her than the Silicon Valley high-fliers that had begun crashing all around her.
"I took a good look and saw that the demographics were on my side," Ms. Alexander said. "The boomers are almost 50, or older, and their parents are dying. They're getting sentimental about being the holder of the family knowledge, about the huge quantities of photos and footage they possess, and they realize they should do something with all that material."
"Boomers are in the habit of hiring someone to do their chores," Ms. Alexander said. "They don't mow their own lawns, they don't change their own oil and they don't clean their own homes. Why would they edit their own video?
But just putting your home movies onto DVDs isn't enough. You need a back-up video storage. DVDs burn just as well as old film, as Barbara Nyegaard learned. "It was a very strange feeling, as if I suddenly didn't have a history," she recalled recently. "My whole life before the fire had dissipated."
I've been reading Susan Engel's Context is Everything, The Nature of Memory. She writes "Between the folds of one's mind and the expression in words or pictures of a memory lies a process of manifestation that is extremely complex but worth understanding. " Using current research on memory, vivid anecdotes and examples from autobiographies and memoirs, Engel does much to help us understand the complexity of memory.
My takeaways from her book
"Paradoxically, as more and more of our lives are lived indirectly through these complex layers of representation and media, we become thirstier than ever for accounts of direct experience, experience that remains the central focus of our historical curiousity.
Time Capsule is a site where you can enter any date from today back to 1800 and get a personalized page with news headlines, top books, songs, and tv shows on that date. Very handy when you're putting together a digital story for a celebration, a birthday, a wedding, or for a memorial
Eamonn Fitzgerald writes a delightful blog from Ireland called Eamonn's Fitzgerald's Rainy Day has an eye out for new blogs. He welcomes David Marsh, a fortysomethingish Brit, who writes film reviews, works for a film distributor and runs an online store for children's shoes. David lives in Munich "with a wonderful wife and three delightful children who always behave and say please and thank you. David's blog Raising Chooks is about his adventures with his family.
I was more taken with Eamonn's observations
Those of us who have spent four or more decades on this earth will be familiar with the nostalgic thrill of going up to the attic or down to the basement to rummage around for the box filled with those family photos. Was that black-and-white gap-toothed demon really me? What were we doing to those sepia-tinted hens? The fog clears for a moment and the lost land of childhood is visible again.
In our Digital Age, the past will not be rendered as a box of disparate images. Microsoft, with MyLifeBits, is working on storing and presenting our memories. Senior Microsoft researcher Gordon Bell "has captured a lifetime's worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. He is now paperless, and is beginning to capture phone calls, IM transcripts, television, and radio." Nokia's Lifeblog "automatically organizes your photos, videos, text messages, and multimedia messages into a clear chronology you can easily browse, search, edit, and save." Using Lifeblog, you can "save your mobile images and other data in Nokia Lifeblog on your PC to start your own, ever-growing, life log."
Alongside these big-name ventures, the simple blog now offers parents, and children, an opportunity to chronicle the present and preserve the past. What a wonderful way of keeping the family occupied! And together! Not that one should idealize this kind of thing, though. The blog may turn into a slog and end up abandoned in cyberspace, like so many other websites.
I agree that we now have the digital tools available to chronicle our lives. And it's a wonderful thing. But collecting every damn piece of paper, every email, every photo and transcribed instant messages is not the way to do it. If you can't use your creativity to tell stories that family members and others want to hear and see again and keep, than a likely result will be a cursory look by survivors before deleting the entire contents of the hard drive before discarding the computer. I mean how many bad photos and inane emails will family members want to go through. Life has its dreary parts and so do many collections.
Are you one of those people who have scads of photos in shoeboxes? Or have you converted to digital photos but only print out the very best? Either way, you might want to rethink the way you commemorate family events. Usually people save every photo they've made about the event with the result that no one ever looks at them again after they've seen them once or they keep an emblematic photo to represent the entire event.
Why not use your photos and out takes to put together a slideshow that tells a story in about 3 minutes. Use any one of the many digital editing software tools on the market to make a slideshow, add music, maybe a narration and tell a story. Stories are powerful. Do them now while you're in the full possession of life when you can tell it your way.
According to the August 23rd edition of Newsweek, commemorative DVDs that star the deceased will be coming soon to a funeral home near you.
The industry's now moving to bring funeral directors up to speed. Next month the National Funeral Directors Association convention will premiere its first DVD workshop. The American Board of Funeral Service Education expects all mortuary schools to add digital video courses by 2005. And funeralOne, a funeral tech company, will soon introduce DVD editing software that provides directors with theme templates (such as "animal lover" or "avid sports fan") and preselected background music. It gives new meaning to the term new funeral director.
When Linda Spence asked her mother to write her life story, her mother stared at a blank sheet of paper and asked, "How? Where do I begin?
That proved the inspiration for Legacy, a practical guide to capturing memories that have been stored away with keys to unlocking the recollections that make up a life. Believing that every life has value and knowledge for others, Spence offers a step-by-step guide to writing personal history by using stimulating questions, shared memories and evocative photographs.
I was most moved by what she says about "Why write?"
How do widely separated families keep up with what's going on in each other's families? Yes, there's the phone, occasional family reunions, and photos to share. Yet somehow keeping family members abreast of family news gets more difficult as families grow, extend, disperse and blend. That's why blogs are becoming more popular as a way of keeping everyone up on everyone's doings. And it's a great way of collaborating on family stories and family legacies.
Just in my immediate family, I have two sisters and brothers-in-law, two nieces and two nephews in the Tacoma area, and in San Francisco a brother and sister-in-law who's soon to give birth, while in Geneva, Switzerland, a brother is about to be joined by his soon-to-be wife in the Philippines with their daughter to follow shortly, a brother and his wife and two daughters in Arlington, a mother in Arlington, a sister in a nursing home in Boston and a cousin, husband, niece and nephew in Denver. So just keeping up on the goings-on of Colleen, Robin, Jessica and Chrissie, Julie and Ken, Michah and James O, Robby and Jennifer, Billy and Julieta and Tricia, Kevin and Melinda, Taylor and Lucy, Ruth and Debby, Julie and Deuce, Katherine and Christopher is difficult.
Today, my family is beginning to gather to celebrate the wedding of my brother Billy and Julieta and we're planning on a grand time. And probably the time to start our own family blog.
We'll either use Blogger, a free service from Google where you can create a blog in three easy steps. Sending text is as easy as sending an email and you can designate family members who can post to the main blog. Only downside is that you can't protect your site by requiring a password to enter.
TypePad from Six Apart will allow you to set a password to protect your site. You can upload photos, even video clips for $4.95-$8.95 a month and store them in photo albums
A short time ago, a large European investment bank advised its clients to have sex, ideally with someone they love, reflect on the good things in life, give their bodies enough sleep and exercise regularly. Major news coming from a bank, so the author explained he thought it was time that I reminded people there was more to life than watching screens every day." I think MasterCards Priceless campaign does it better. There are some things money cant buy.
Some things ARE priceless. The sound of a loved ones voice, the smile of your first dog, your grandfathers stories, your daughters graduation, your mothers peanut brittle, your greatest triumphs, your biggest regret, what you love, who you love, who you are. If you fail to capture them in a way that they can be given away or passed on, they lose their value. Worse, youll probably forget them and no one will ever know. One of the most haunting quotes Ive ever read is by Joan Didion, We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget; we forget what we whispered and what we dreamed; we forget who we were
Thats why I think its so important to make a legacy plan. Yes, its for your family, your children and grandchildren yet unborn; but, its also for yourself. Its how you keep in touch with your former selves - who you were at 20 and who you were when your first child was born, and after you lost your father, what you learned and what you thought was most important. So the sooner you can start on your legacy plan, the better and richer it will be. Its how youll see how far youve come.
Im assuming that you all as responsible adults have both a financial plan and an estate plan. Youll be glad to know that making a legacy plan is a lot more fun to put together and far more meaningful. It will keep you more organized during life. It will save your survivors a lot of trouble and grief. Most importantly, it will give your family something priceless.
So what is a legacy plan? While it can be whatever you want, I think it should include:
1. The Gift of Good Records: a master list of what and where everything is and who to contact. Your master list should include a list of your all your assets and debts, a list of your fiduciaries and a list of your advisors.
2. The Gift of Good Directions. Too little used is the Letter to Your Executor. Unlike a will, it is not legally binding so you dont need a lawyer or witnesses; however, it carries great moral weight and its something you can revise and update easily by yourself. This letter is where you can include last wishes concerning organ donations and funeral celebrations, how you want smaller personal articles distributed and to whom and the stories behind them, your emergency numbers, the passwords to your computer files and what you want done with them and any other directions you think important.
3. The Gift of Family. Everyone loves stories. Stories are how we make sense of our lives. Stories connect one generation to another. Memorialize your family stories so they are not lost. Think about capturing the stories of children when theyre young and then giving them copies when they graduate or get married. Include your own stories when you pass on treasured family recipes, traditions and your family tree. Blogs are wonderful new online tools families can use to exchange and preserve stories, post photos, and collaborate on family history. You dont have to understand any code at all to use the new blog tools like typepad (www.typepad.com). Photos. We all have boxes and boxes of them. Take the time or use a service to get your photos scanned into digital form. There are wonderful new tools you can learn and use to make digital stories, easily shared and accessible far into the future. Some tips: Tell a story. Edit, edit, edit. 15 well-chosen photos or clips that carry your narrative line are better than 500 photos in a box. Keep it short, no more than 3 minutes. Narrate it yourself. We forget how important the voice is; yet, it often is what you miss most when someone passes on. We all have enough stuff; we dont need more; but we never have enough stories. Ellen Goodman once wrote, This packrat has learned that what the next generation will value most is not what we owned, but the evidence of who we were and the tales of how we loved. In the end, it's the family stories that are worth the storage.
4. The Gift of Yourself. These are the treasures of your heart. Sometimes called an ethical will or a personal legacy statement, its the vehicle wherein you lay out what was most important in your life. Its what you loved and who you loved and why. It can include your life story- the high points, the turning points, the regrets, the lessons learned. You can make clear why you did the things you did. Why you choose that career or moved to California or started that company. Why you supported the charities you did and how you were inspired to set up a foundation. Its also your hopes for the future, your wishes for your children, the dreams for what youve begun. Now, an ethical will takes time and can be hard work but its tremendously rewarding. You can do it over a period of time or in a workshop. Or you can hire a professional to interview you and ask you questions and then give you a first draft you can edit. Once youre pleased with what you have, it can be printed or you can read it on videotape. Ask anyone, young or old, whos lost a parent what it would be worth to see that parent on a DVD talking about their love and their hopes and youll understand what a priceless gift you can leave. In the end, its love that connects, its love that counts, its love that binds us together even after death.
Walt Mossberg, the creator of the weekly Personal Technology editor at the Wall Street Journal, writes so well that I would rather read him than anyone else on new technology. He writes about technology in plain English that I can understand and doesn't treat me, the reader, like a simpleton. Last week, he wrote about Telling Stories in Photo Programs that Help you Share Pictures But Need Improvement
I believe everyone should create their own personal legacy for their families and the future--whether it's an ethical will, life lessons learned, personal memoirs or a video biography. People today are proud of their lives -what they've accomplished, what they've seen and experienced, the choices they made. Shoshanna Zuboff, author of The Support Economy, calls today's boomers "psychologically individuated" and proud of it. They have made the most of the potential of their lives. Why not celebrate it? Why shouldn't boomers who have believed in individuality throughout their lives create personal legacy archives to show what their lives meant to them. Why wait for the funeral and the eulogy?
Boomers after all, will have the time to reflect on that meaning, given that they will live on for 30-40 years and we now have the tools to create personal digital archives. There are blogs, digital photos, videos, and iTunes -the music of your life you can weave into anything. Boomers too are the connection between their parents, the WW2 generation, and their children who are totally digital.
Apple, of course, is leading the way and creating the best tools for iLife. If Microsoft dominates the tools needed for office life, Apple surely dominates the tools for the rest of your life with GarageBand to make your own music, iTunes to organize your music, iPhoto to sort and edit photos, iMovie to edit your own video and iDVD to create your own DVD.
Now we are seeing the first of the tools to create Personal Legacies. Telling Stories is a software program available for $50 at www.tellingstories.com. The program helps you organize your photos and music and videos to tell the story of your life or your parents. Any major life event can be celebrated with a multimedia commemoration. And so you create your own memoirs, chapter by chapter.
Rachel Lucas, one of my favorite bloggers, in Saying Goodbye to Grandpa (sorry link no longer works and Rachel only blogs occasionally now)
He did more than that, of course, but the story of the old home movies shows what kind of man he was: kind, gentle, quiet, stable, funny. In the end, the comfort comes in knowing that he had a good long life and was surrounded by people he loved when that life ended. It's what we all hope for, and he had it. And for that, I'm happy.
The tape was full of old movies of myself and my siblings that I'd never seen before, movies of our early childhood, of our parents as very young newlyweds, of my mother pregnant with her first child. I had no idea these movies existed.
You see, Grandpa had a camcorder in the 1990s, and at family gatherings, he was always there in the background, silent, recording little snippets of our lives. What I didn't know was that he also used to have an 8 mm movie camera (sans sound) in the 1960s and 70s. Unbeknownst to me, he'd taken reels and reels of footage of my siblings and me when we were infants and toddlers.
So, late in his life, he decided to put all the footage he'd ever taken onto one VHS tape. He sat down one day and set up his 8 mm projector to play the movies on a white wall. Then he put his modern-day camcorder on a tripod and aimed it at that wall. While he played the old movies, he recorded with the camcorder. The best part is that as the silent 8 mm movies played on the wall, he narrated into the camcorder.
Then he used two VCRs to transfer all the VHS footage he'd taken in the last decade or so onto the same tape with the 8 mm movies. Thus did he compile one master tape with every bit of movie footage he'd ever taken of our family. He then made copies and gave them to us. My copy is now one of my most prized possessions, and I watched it last night after my dad called to tell me Grandpa had died.
There are six of us grandchildren, and when most of us were born, Grandpa was there with his 8 mm camera. His narration for these portions of the tape go like this: "Well, there's little Ricky. Hey there, Ricky! There's his mama now, Linda...this was in 1967 in Irving, Texas." At one point, it goes from footage of Rick (my older brother) as a newborn to Rick just learning to walk, and Grandpa narrates: "Why, looky there! Little Ricky learning to walk. There ya go, boy!" His comments are funny and sweet, just little observations about his grandchildren. Years of our tiny lives, captured on film by our Grandpa.
There is one example I always point to when people ask me what can they do with old pictures. It's what my favorite blogger James Lileks did with his grandma's camera
But I do know the faces, and that makes all the difference. You, of course, do not - yet you might find these interesting nonetheless. Its a small portion of a record a young farm wife made of her times with her camera. ... She wanted these things to be remembered. And so they are.