This postEarlier this evening I called my grandmother to wish her a happy birthday. I’d only intended to talk for five or ten minutes, but I’d been reading Rumors of War (a novel by Dean Hughes set in the first couple of years of WWII) and realized that Grandma had lived during that time. So I asked her about it and I ended up listening to her tell me stories about her life for a full hour, all the while I busily scribbled down notes as fast as I could manage. Ended up with six 3×5″ notebook pages, which I then transferred in 7pt handwriting :) to my genealogy Moleskine, and just now I wrote up the more interesting bits and e-mailed them off to my family.
This is addicting. :)
You’d think that the lives of ordinary people wouldn’t be all that interesting, but it’s quite the opposite. Everyone has stories. And stories are good. For example, here’s how she heard about Pearl Harbor:
When she was 13, she always went to the movies on the weekend with her sister, since the theater was only two blocks away and the movies cost only 35 cents. On December 7th, 1941, she and her sister got out of a movie just as it was getting dark. Ordinarily there were lots of people outside, but on this night the streets were deserted. The two girls got home and found their mother sitting in the dark in front of the radio. “We’re at war,” she told them.
Fascinating stuff, really. Sure, she’s my grandmother, but I think the interest level of stories like this doesn’t have as much to do with relation as you’d think. Or at least the stories have enough intrinsic interest that you can be intrigued by someone else’s story even if they’re not a relative.
I love stories. A lot. So now I’m going to go finish reading Rumors of War because I’ve only got 30 pages to go and I’ve got to find out how it ends. :)
