The Family Memoirs

I've always been a letter-writer.....well, that is until my good friend Barbara moved to Arizona not long ago and took up email. She and I were the last of a dying breed. While I will admit to having given up, at some point, the handwritten letter in favor of the much faster word-processing version, Barbara always wrote longhand, usually on a steno pad, on occasional Thursdays (before she vacuumed) when her boss, the optometrist, was out of the office.

My mom and dad were letter-writers too. Along with newsy items about their activities, they would sometimes include interesting stuff.....like an article from the newspaper on child-rearing, a favorite recipe, and sometimes a birthday check. While I always kept the enclosures, I rarely kept the letters. Maybe I had a few clutter-free tendencies even then. My dad, on the other hand, kept all of my letters. To him they were not clutter, and he had the brilliant foresight to know that someday I might like to have them.

Many years ago, when he was healthy and doing crafty things himself, he custom-made two boxes and shipped many of my letters back to me. The one above (the earliest in the collection) is from 1966, when my sister and I traveled to Europe on a student tour. The trip began with a flight to Washington, D.C. where we spent a few days before flying on to London. I wrote that we were having a marvelous time, and I enclosed the airline lunch menu. Kinda makes me hark back to the good ol' days.....

At some point I decided to embark on a family memoirs project, whereby I would re-read the letters, beginning in 1981 when Mr. G. and I married, and move forward. Along the way I would highlight a few items in many of them, and later re-type these newsy tidbits in chronological order, year-by-year. While I was never one to keep accurate baby books for TG and BCG wherein I should have recorded their first steps and lost teeth, I wrote it all in letters to my folks.

A few have asked why I didn't just scan the letters. Aside from that itself being a big project, it would also result in way too many pages, not to mention there are probably a few things better left unwritten. Once the whole thing has been saved on a disk of some kind and published....one for each kid should they at some point in their lives want to look back (like, I can only hope and pray, when they have teenagers for instance)....... I will shred the whole pile.

I know I've mentioned in previous posts that I'm a person who likes to track things. Little did I know, until I started this blog, just how much of a tracker I am. And just so you know, it doesn't stop here. I kept notes on an inside-the-desk calendar for a couple of years while Mr. G and I were dating.....movies we saw, restaurants we ate at, concerts, trips and all sorts of stuff. Needless to say, much of this will most certainly qualify as "better left unwritten"...heh....heh.....