Tim and I were talking about the concept of “hometowns” a few days ago. Being an Army brat, I never felt that I had a hometown. Even though we mostly stayed in one area during the last seven years of my public school education before I left for college, we lived in three houses in three towns and it involved three schools.
My father did have a hometown, however, a place where he came from two families whose ancestors had helped found the town. He grew up knowing everyone and everyone knowing him, and he had a lifelong best friend. When he left the Army after World War II, he went back to that hometown. I’m not sure exactly what he did then unless it was to try forgetting the unforgettable, to learn how to live again within the embrace of a family who loved him, and to breathe and survey a familiar landscape.
His best friend was Jess, and since this photo doesn’t have names on it, I’m assuming this is Jess (on the left) with my father. It’s dated, so I know it was taken the year my father married my mother, possibly taken by my mother. Four years after it was taken, my father was in school at Alabama, he and my mother had a three-year-old and a five-month-old, and Jess died when he wrecked his car on a country road outside their hometown.
My father rarely told stories about the friends he lost in war, but he did talk about Jess. It was a loss that always stayed with him.
Trying not to name names here–don’t want to get anyone in trouble!–but I was recently in a conversation about the impatience of the young for the elderly. My friend had read an online account of someone who was beyond exasperated about having to wait in line at the grocery store while a senior wrote a check. She ranted about old people shopping, about not using debit cards, etc. This person’s diatribe appalled my friend enough to make her write a satirical response, in the manner of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” which probably went right over the enraged shopper’s head.
Yes, we live in a fast world, and yes, it’s sometimes populated by people who don’t and can’t live at a fast pace. But when I see old people, I think of the infinite stories of their lives: their triumphs, their losses. Their great loves and heartbreaks. All the experiences that make up the few decades they get on this planet. And even if they never travel very far from their hometowns, the journeys they’ve made with their hearts have been a long adventure as noble and perilous as any we read in books or see in movies. The least we can do is show a little courtesy when they move more slowly than the rest of us. Because actually, we’re only rushing toward the same place where they’re living.
I don’t hometown. Home has always been an alien concept till I moved here .. Anywho, I wanted to tell you that the Christians were not a photo taking family at all, but your Legacy writing has made me want to learn a little more about the people I am descended from and today I spent a ton of time looking at Ancestry.com – and I was able to see research that some sweet soul had done on my great grandmothers side of the family, all the way back to the mid 1500’s !!! What did I discover, I got a whole lot of Swiss in me, my great greats fought in some pretty major battles that I never knew about ( thank god I am still Southern) and another great great was guerilla fighter in the American Revolution ( our side! )
We can go to our DAR meetings together now! 😉
It’s cool that you’re able to find out all this stuff.
I wish I could take credit, but I really lucked in to it – and as for the DAR, I am just glad to have a member on the winning side! However the guerilla aspect is a total Christian family thing, which apparently we inherited from the Whisenhunts.
Lots of Legacy writing this year, I see. One of those kind of years?
It’s a year-long project. A while back, an artist friend did what he called Draw 365, in which he and other people sketched something every day of the year and posted their sketches to a Flickr group. Last year, wanting to do something similar, I did a Magnetic Poetry poem a day for 365 days.
So when 2011 ended, I decided to take on another “365” project using photos from my–and my mother’s–extensive archives. I pull a photo at random–or maybe one that has meaning on a specific date–and write something from my memories. It’s a way to write every single day–not quite a memoir, but from the memory.
But it’s also a way to write down a few family things that my nieces and nephews or their children may want to read one day. The people who could answer a lot of my family questions are dead–if only they’d had blogs!
Thank you for this, Becky. We “slow people” need all the help we can get. 😉
Trust me, everyone calls me the “granny driver,” so I’m right there with you!
I continue to thank you for your Legacy Writings. It is so exciting to see pictures of family, pictures I never expected to see. They were, indeed, the best of friends! Tragic loss for Uncle Bill. Fortunately, he had already met your mother when the accident occurred.
I’m so glad you’re enjoying them. It’s wonderful to know someone who knew my parents before me–and as someone other than parents–can read these entries (and please tell me if I get anything wrong!).