With my cup of coffee in hand I leave the kitchen and enter the living room, walking by the dining room table I grab one diary.
It is not mine. It is my Uncle Rixon's. I pick: October 1st to June 30th 1942-3.
This past spring Rixon's daughter Gertrude passed away.
Aunt Gertrude, as she was affectionately known to her cousins and their children, had left me some items from her estate.
Aunt Gertrude’s mother, Adele, was known for her love of jewelry. My plan was to give each of the granddaughters one piece. Thinking it would be the start to a nice family tradition. Unfortunately, once the boxes were opened almost all of it had disappeared.
Right now there are two ways I could go with this story. One to discuss protecting our aging love ones from those who seem to think they can take advantage of their vulnerabilities or I can talk about what was left.
I opt to focus on what remains.
Over the summer I had organized pictures and trinkets for other family members and during the Christmas Holidays more time was dedicated to Aunt Gertrude by finishing off the decision making.
There was an endless sea of papers, pictures, Bibles, and notes. Wasn’t sure if we were going to get through it all; we did and unexpectedly we began to understand who these people were. The prized possession? The dozen or so diaries belonging to Uncle Rixon.
In his time writing entries into a Diary was an accepted form of expression which generally highlighted the activities of daily life.
He tried to get his daughter Gertrude to do the same. There were a few attempts from her. I had a chuckle or two because this is where one can see the next generation begin to rebel against the established way of doing certain behaviors. Clearly, she hated it and rather than talking about what was going on around her in a somewhat object way she wanted to talk about how she was feeling and sensing the world.
Is keeping a diary any different than what is happening in the modern era with people around the world expressing their life experiences and thoughts through mediums such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Google+? And, what about those reality television shows?
People seem to have a strong desire to tell their story of how they see the world.
As posted on Wikipedia a story is described by Reynolds Price as: a need to tell and hear being is essential to the species Homo sapiens – second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths...
Further to Wikipedia.... storytelling is the conveying of events in words, images and sounds, often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation and in order to instill moral values.
Now a days the ways to communicate our stories seem endless.
In his daily entries Uncle Rixon writes what he does first thing in the morning “disposing of correspondence." Next on to his job as an engineer in the transportation industry and his Headquarters being Port Arthur, Ontario the District is Nagogami to Manitoba, back around to his wife Adele and daughter Gertrude, attending services at both the Anglican Parish and United Church – counting the number of children who attended Sunday School, Choir, chopping wood, enjoying the outdoors, and fussing endlessly over the gladiolus bulbs.
Isn't "disposing of correspondence" the same as checking our emails and text messages? It seems to me the art of expression is still occurring. We have just merely changed the way we are recording our history.
Rather than giving each granddaughter a piece of Aunt Adele’s jewelry. They are instead getting a religious book of some sort.
At the end of the day in spite of all the seemly missing items along with piles of things left behind when my Aunt moved for the first time what mattered the most - the real moral backbone and treasure of this family - was their Church and its community. Without those diaries and the stories that Uncle Rixon left behind that point was - and may - have been missed entirely.
What's your story? thInQ About It!
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