I cannot believe it’s been almost a month since I wrote a blog entry! It’s been quite a month too. The holidays plus a whole lot of illness equals one wiped-out mom. So now the holidays are over, and everyone is healthy for the moment, *knock on wood* so I’ve had a minute or two to think. And I’ve been thinking about storytelling.

For most of my life, I didn’t really have a grandfather. My dad’s dad passed away when I was just eight years old, and my mom’s father was an abusive alcoholic so we didn’t have much of a relationship with him. So when my husband’s grandpa Fred heartily welcomed me into his family, I was pleased. It was a new experience to me, and I liked listening to his stories. He was from a wealthy family in New England, and his stories painted pictures of a more refined, more conscientious way of living. He came from a world where you “dressed for dinner,” where women wore gloves and men wore hats, where etiquette was not a fifth-grade vocabulary word but an everyday behavior.

But my adopted grandfather was not a snob. For the last fifteen years of his life, he lived in West Baden Springs, Indiana, in a converted Amish pole barn that was probably not much bigger than my parents’ garage. He liked his place in the woods and told us of the intrigues at his country church as well as of the antics of the cats and wildlife that inhabited the woods around his home.

In between his wealthy youth and his modest retirement, Fred served in World War II, fathered two children, lost two wives to cancer, lived in homes all across the country, and tried his hand at several different careers. He met some fascinating people along the way, and I got to hear many stories about these folks as well.
Perhaps it’s because I didn’t really have a grandfather of my own. Perhaps it’s because I never lived with Fred or had to put up with his foibles and peccadilloes for very long. Or perhaps it’s because I hadn’t heard them for years and years, but I enjoyed Fred’s stories and often, I felt like the only person in the room who was actually listening. My mother-in-law and her brother would sometimes interrupt him with an impatient, “Yes, Dad, you’ve told us that before.” My husband would zone out or find a way to sneak out of the room. And it’s true that after a couple years, I started hearing the same stories over again, usually prefaced by Fred’s favorite intro: “Now, I have to tell you this…”

Fred passed away a couple days before Thanksgiving, but he was cremated and will be laid to rest in New Hampshire. So instead of the usual funeral, we’re having a memorial service this Saturday. In preparation for it, my husband’s putting together a slide show, and so we’ve been going through pictures. Some of the photographs are very old and damaged; some of them are of people my mother-in-law does not recognize. And I started thinking about all those stories Fred told over and over again.

I’ve seen it in old people before, this tendency to repeat the same stories, but I’ve always written it off as poor memory, senility, or a need for attention. But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it’s God’s version of Knowledge Management. It’s a way for human beings to pass down what they’ve learned to the next generation. After all, before the invention of written language, oral storytelling was a vital tradition. It was our only way of passing information along to others. Sure, we have other means of preserving our collective knowledge nowadays - books, video, audio, the Internet - but maybe we’re hard-wired to tell our stories over and over again as we sense the end of our lives.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad I listened. I’m glad I can tell my son and daughter a little about the life of their great-grandfather. And I hope they’ll listen to their old mom’s stories. “Now, I have to tell you this!”