Beyond Their Times

[thisnewday]

It takes me forever, these days, to find the right words for even a short entry like this one. And it's not like I'm crafting lines destined for the hallowed canons of American literature. More like a simple story or two that might happen to survive, on a remote server somewhere, a few days or weeks beyond my own last breath.

Even so, I sometimes wonder if my own father aspired to that, the sort of immortality conferred through the telling of a story. His long life had spanned the decades between the rutted, unpaved roads of a rural childhood and, near the end of his accounting career, the earliest, unmarked miles of the information superhighway.

In between, he had helped man the hand-cranked adding machines, considered a lucky find during a critical campaign, for the Allied planning section that he served with during the Second World War.

He would tell that story, and others like it, over and over, perhaps hoping that I would remember the names that went with the faces that only he could see, against the backdrop of a history that was uniquely his.

I'm pretty sure that I could remember a few of them, if I really tried. But I could never tell the stories as he once told them, with the terrifying pulse of Hitler's V-1 "buzz bombs" cruising low over London followed by the ominous silence and the ground-shaking concussion and the apocalyptic vision of falling buildings, alive behind his eyes.

I sometimes think about those names and wonder if I should try. Or if I should simply leave them to their rest, those kept alive beyond their times by the words of an old, old man...

LPK
LiveJournal
2.20.2012 (b)

Comments

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

Well, you can tell your dad's story. maybe you'll want to write it as fiction, and change names.

And you have a story or two worth telling, yourself. Don't forget that!

[olbuksings.livejournal.com]

I know this is gonna sound wierd, but I feel about these stories, these names, these unseen faces, as a Native American faithkeeper might feel. That I've been given or, ironically, cursed with, something holy that I dare not alter in the re-telling of it. You know, the history of "The Greatest Generation," and all of that.

And, to use the parlance of a just-passed era, "It's so heavy." So I think I may try to deal with it somewhat intuitively, letting it come out in my own stories as it seems to demand.

But always with this feeling, that the names, and the unseen faces, are somehow holy...

[egg-shell.livejournal.com]

I found your journal by way of a comment you left on another journal and in reading this entry really resonated with me. My dad wasn't in the war but he still had so many stories he told over and over. He so much wanted me to save them for him but my heart wasn't in it. He wanted me to write a book of his stories. I never did - though I did get out a cassette player and record him telling many of them himself. It makes me sad to think that the stories are basically lost (as I'm not sure now where the tapes are anymore) but even though I'm sad about it I'm not sad too - I'm ready to let them go. They were his stories and lived with him - no one could ever tell them like he did.

[olbuksings.livejournal.com]

That's very interesting because you actually did what I've often wished that I had done. There was kind of a sense, with my father, of a connection with that long tradition of pre-literate oral histories. And so my suggestion that he write them down was both completely inappropriate and totally unsuccessful. He tried writing one or two of them, but it was clear that he would never find his voice as a writer as he had as an oral historian.

What he did write was volumes of letters to my mother, when she was back in the states and he was overseas, but I later found out that he had given the whole cache, for reasons that I can't begin to fathom, to one of my nephews. Sort of like Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald ditching all of Scott's letters, in my estimation.

But maybe that's just as well because otherwise I might feel bound to them, my own writing constrained by them, in the same way that my very life felt defined and constrained by his expectations, for as long as he lived. Which now makes me wonder if he somehow knew that and, wisely, did me a favor. Then again, nah.

Anyway, thanks for your thought-provoking comment.