In a house which becomes a home,
one hands down and another takes
the heritage of mind and heart,
laughter and tear, musings and deeds.
Love, like a carefully loaded ship, crosses the gulf between the generations .
Therefore, we do not neglect the ceremonies
of our passage, when we wed, when we die,
and when we are blessed with a child;
When we depart and when we return;
When we plan and when we harvest.
Let us bring up our children. It is not
the place of some official to hand to them
their heritage.
If others impart to our children our knowledge and ideal, they will lose all of us that is wordless and full of wonder
Let us build memories in our children,
lest they allow treasures to be lost because
they have not been given the keys.
We live, not by things, but by the meaning
of things. It is needful to transmit the passwords
from generation to generation.
Antoine de St. Exupery

When I get my newspaper in the morning the first thing I do is read the comics. One of the comics I regularly read is, "For Better or For Worse," a strip which follows the humorous and sometimes poignant goings-on of one family. A few months ago the family dog died. The story line of how the family dealt with the dog's death unfolded over several days. In the last strip of that series the mother is pictured washing the dog's dish saying "I guess I should put this away." As she goes to the closet she recalls a number of the dog's antics and characteristics. Putting the bowl on the closet shelf she says, "Memories -- they make a three dollar dish priceless."
We all have such cherished memories, whether they come from seeing an object, looking at a photo, or just thinking about a person or event.
For me, one such cherished memory comes from my childhood years. In July, we would have the annual family beach outing convened by Grandma Zelazny for her children and grandchildren. On the morning of the gathering my mother would spoon her potato salad into the big green ceramic bowl, cover it with tin foil and place it into the cooler. We would load up the Oldsmobile with the cooler, a thermos jug filled with a juice concoction my father had made, an assortment of plastic shovels and pails and my toy cars, and a couple of very worn Indian-print blankets. Then we, my parents, sister and I would begin the trip across town to Presque Isle State Park, a peninsula of woods and sand arching out into Lake Erie. About a mile away from the park entrance we would become a part of the ant-trail line of cars slowly moving into the park. We crawled along the two lane concrete park road searching for Grandma's car, with its white handkerchief tied to the door handle.
Dad would usually begin to grow very impatient with the traffic as he drove along the narrow roadway with its sand shoulders looking for a parking place. We eventually would find one, usually a long hike away from where we had spotted my Grandmother's car. With the admonition to watch the traffic, we trekked back with our food and play items to where the family was assembling around wood picnic tables under the trees at the perimeter of the beach. Grandma and my Aunt Irene would be sitting on the table's seats, faces glistening with smeared-on cocoa butter. They believed in cocoa butter as a tanning ointment.
Eventually the food came out -- along with the little black sand flies. My dad cooked the hot dogs on the grill, which we ate with the inevitable grit of sand mixed in with the mustard and relish. In the afternoon as we waited the mandated one hour before we could go in swimming, I would build elaborate highway systems in the sand dunes for my toy cars. A little later my cousins and I would usually bury my oldest cousin, Mickie, in the sand. Finally we would be allowed to go into the water. I can recall my father valiantly trying to teach me to swim, calling for me to "kick, kick, kick" as I flung my arms in the water.
When late afternoon came, and we packed up the left over food and beach items, trudged back to the car, placed old plastic table cloths on the car seats so as not to get them filled with sand and again joined an ant-trail of cars driving out of the part on that two lane road. We were exhausted, dirty and usually displaying more than a tinge of red skin on legs and arms. They were wonderful outings.
A while ago, during a visit with my parents, I mentioned my recollection of Grandma Zelazny's picnic outing. This generated other picnic stories of my father's mother - how she loved strong coffee which she began brewing in an old beat-up aluminum pot at 7:00 in the morning when she went out to the beach to plant her claim on the picnic table; and how in the 1920's, as a young mother, she had taken her two children to the beach on the ferry which crossed the bay.
And as we told our stories, for a brief moment my grandmother, the one who made the best elderberry pies, who loved face creams and visits to the beauty parlor, and who wanted to buy a red sports car when she was 70, was alive again.
That is the value of family stories. Stories keep people alive. It is through the telling of family stories that we ensure immortality for our family members, regardless of the time that has passed on into eternity.
The telling of stories has another benefit. It gives us an historical consciousness about who we are, and makes our ancestors a tangible part of our lives, even if they were unknown to us personally.
My great grandmother was a tiny woman who baked her own bread. One day she struggled and struggled to get a loaf out of a pan. Cradling the pan in her left arm, she used a large blunt butcher's knife to scrape around the side of the loaf. She scraped and scraped and scraped but the bread loaf refused to fall free. Finally, in exasperation she flung the pan into the corner of her kitchen telling it, in Polish, where it could spend eternity.
My great grandmother died a dozen years before I was born. But my father's telling of that story, whenever he bakes his holiday sweetbread brings her into our house. I can even imagine what into corner the pan would have been flung if she had been standing in our kitchen.
To not tell family stories, as St. Exupery wrote, is to lose treasures because family members were not given the keys. In my family we have very little knowledge about some extended family members and almost no knowledge about our family's life in the "old country." The elder relatives, either because of great internalized fear, or embarrassment, or family trauma, or their earnest desire to be accepted as Americans, adamantly refused to talk about their pre-immigration family life to my parents . The little we do know about the villages the family came from, the great-grandparents' arrival in the United States, and their marriages, has been assembled from conversation gleaning. A couple of years ago the last of the older generation died, taking with her the knowledge of my family history.
There is one more reason for seeking out and telling family stories. Family stories help us understand ourselves -- the motives, the attitudes, the expectations we carry. By telling, and by careful listening to, our family stories we can come to know what were the subtle, and sometimes not-so-subtle, influences on our lives. We can know why we have the emotional responses to certain situations that we have. We can comprehend why we have the perspectives on life and living that we have.
The value of having this understanding about why we do what we do, or see the world the way we see it, is that we are then better able to guide our lives. When we are conscious of why certain actions or words or things make us angry, or jealous, or sullen, or combative, or unbalanced we can make conscious efforts to break destructive or nonproductive behavior patterns. We can learn what to do so that we are not caught in the cycle of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory or falling into dysfunctional behavior patterns. Likewise, when we know what gives us pleasure, or promotes personal productivity we can mold our environment to help us be successful.
Stories are a wonderful way to communicate to others and to ourselves. Stories communicate more richly, more easily, and more dramatically than talk in abstractions. Talking in stories-telling of tales from the memory album-makes the events and persons real, and puts both the story teller and the hearer in the picture.
And what better things are there to communicate than the rich heritage we each have of our families? May we use our families' stories to seek wisdom, to pass on our history, to tell others about what we cherish, to convey love.

Ed. Note:
What are your family stories? Get out an old family photo album and look through it for pictures which evoke a family story you can pass on to your children.

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