We All Have a Story to Tell

Stories. We've all got one or many and we are all apart of one...or many. Our stories link us to others and tell us who we are as an individual, a family and even an ancestry.

I grew up in a family of storytellers. Hard to believe I know. From my earliest moments I remember my mother regaling me with tales of her youth, growing up as the eleventh child and also youngest child of farmers in the red dirt of Oklahoma. As a kid, I would rather listen to my mom tell stories than watch TV and ever so often I could corner her of an evening and prod her for hours about her childhood, her life and all that she was willing to divulge in story form.

My mom had a decided advantage over her other brothers and sisters growing up and that advantage was that she was the youngest. The baby. With there being a 20 year gap between her and her oldest sister and a three year gap between her and her brother who was the next above her in age, Mom pretty much had my grandmothers undivided attention whenever she wanted it and like me, she would corner her mother and prod her for hours to tell stories of her childhood, her life and all the stories she knew about the family.

From my mother and my grandmother by extension, I learned about my maternal great grandfather Henry Bennett Etier, who was a French Canadian and a roamer. He seldom settled for long, traveling all over from Louisiana to Oklahoma and areas in between. Even though settling in one place for more than a short while was not to be his life, he managed to marry three times, outliving all of his wives and through these wives he ended up with 14 children. All of his boys were named after presidents or famous men and all of his girls were named after flowers and states. My grandmothers name was Grace Missouri. She later change it though to Grace Mary after joining the Catholic church. My grandmother was also Henry's youngest child and she was the seventh daughter. My mother was also a seventh daughter which my grandmother always said that the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter was special and that my mom would have an understanding and knowledge of things that others do not. She was right. My mother did.

There were stories of how Grace married into the large and boisterous Dougherty clan and she would tell of my my grandfathers father and how he had died in a tragic horse and buggy accident leaving my great grandmother a widow. There were stories of how the Dougherty's came to the United States from Ireland and how once arriving here were looked on as "dirty Mick immigrants" and were seen as only good for hard labor such as working on the Erie Canal or working as chamber maids for the more affluent English immigrants.

There were stories of how the Dougherty's left the New York area and traveled by covered wagon  hoping to find a better life and land of their own. They were part of a wagon train heading west towards the promise of freedom and their own part of this vast and quickly developing new country. They settled in Iowa and stayed there until the Oklahoma Land Rush and the promise of an even better future beckoned them....and then it was Oklahoma with it's red dirt and land a plenty where they settled.

All of these stories handed down and told in great detail always filled me with pride and a sense of who I was and were I came from. I soaked every ounce of information in like the geeky little sponge I was and even at a very young age, long before the internet and Ancestry.com I was researching even more of my family. Through this fascination and determination I broke out of my shell and began to bug other family members about their memories and even began long pen-pal relationships with distant relatives that I never met face to face but knew intimately because of the life stories they shared with me. It was a great hobby to have and I learned so much.

Now don't think that my mother was the only one that I would corner for these family history lessons. My grandfather Robert Castle Jacques on my dads side was still living when I was a young child. He had had an exciting life (at least by this small town girls standards), and he loved to spend hours talking about his life and the people he had met in his life almost as much as I loved listening to him. He was part of large family growing up in a tiny town in Kansas. When he was seven years old, his family could no longer afford to provide for him as times were tough, so he took out on his own. Over his life time he worked as a ranch hand at the famous 101 Ranch in Ponca City, OK which was owned and run by Buffalo Bill Cody. He of course met the man himself, not to mention Annie Okley and the famous Sitting Bull. He also worked on the railroad and in the oil fields for many years and met the likes of Howard Hughes Sr and his infamous son Howard Hughes, Lyndon B. Johnson before he ever even thought of the White House and various other famous and not so famous and yet extremely colorful people. I would sit for hours mesmerized by his life and the humility in which he told his stories. I don't think he had a clue how fascinating he truly was.

After my grandfather passed away, I would then harangue my own dad to continue the legacy started by his dad and to fill in the questions that one has after someone dies and you think "I should have asked that." My dad given the right opportunity and the right state of mind could tell a pretty good story himself and I would learn what it was like for him as a small town Kansas kid during the depression. He would tell of times when his family was well off enough to have housekeeper and then when the depression was full on, how they barely had enough to eat. There were stories of my dad as a young man with a dream to own his own farm and how he worked night and day to keep that farm up and running. When farming was no longer a viable way for him to make a living, he came to Wichita and went to work where he stayed until he retired. 

I guess you could say I am a story junkie. I love my families stories and I love to hear the stories of other families too. We each are so much more than the world knows and we all have a family legacy of sinners and saints, tough times and glory days. They make us who we are and give us something to pass on to future generations. Sadly, with the world as it is today, my kids aren't the story lovers that I was. They don't have the time and maybe the interest to sit down without TV, phone or electronic gadgets and just learn about who they are and about the people who came before them. Perhaps this is why I blog. Perhaps someday, long after I am gone, my kids and grand kids will be able to look back on my body of written work and learn a little about me, my parents, grand parents and about how their family came to be. My hope is that it gives them roots and a sense of the history that makes them who they are as both individuals and family. If that happens, then perhaps, my purpose here on this earth will have surely been fulfilled.

History, Legacy and Laura Ingalls Wilder

Travel with me if you will to a time in the not so distant future. Let's say we travel to 2168. It is a mere 150 years into time where the likelihood of anyone currently reading this still being alive is nil.

Life in 2168 will obviously be much different than our current times. Perhaps daily transportation will actually have taken to the skies, maybe earth will not be our only choice in living and vacationing destinations and hopefully mankind will have exceeded 2018 in their ability to stomp out the deadly diseases of both the body and society.

It is likely that if we were to actually jump ahead, we would not even recognize the world in 2168. Their slang, fashion and ideals would assuredly be vastly different and likely these future beings would have no real grasp on who we were in 2018 as a civilization or a people. In fact, the only thing left of us and the foot print of our existence will be the literature, art, architecture and statues we leave behind. These are the things that tell the future world that we were here, that we existed and without us.....for better or worse....that they would not be here. 

Now let's take this one step further and let's imagine that in 2168, they have their own ideas about how the world should be and their own "political correctness" if you will and the past (our current world) doesn't fit with their view. What if they decided because 9/11 or Vietnam or the Obama administration didn't fit in with their "current" belief system that they would just gloss over them in history books or simply make no reference to them at all? What if Martin Luther King Jr's personal life was looked into and something was found that the people of 2168 found unseemly and therefore his statues were unceremoniously and disrespectfully yanked down and all of his good works, his dreams and his fighting for this country were down played and lost to future generations?

What if F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce or William Faulkner were authors pulled from shelves and their works banned because their writing was not in keeping with the ideals or morality of the up and coming times? What if the art of Pablo Picaso, Georgia O'Keefe and even Andy Warhol were pulled from museums and hidden from the world because they spoke of a time chosen to be forgotten or they saw the world in a way that 2168 found distasteful or at odds with the world they choose to currently believe in?

What if the people of our time such as President John F. Kennedy, Mahatma Gandhi or General Norman Schwarzkopf were either bastardized or written out of history completely? And what if the civil rights movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the election of the first black president were made unimportant or the history of the events were dissected and rewritten to fit the modern worlds way of thinking? What if our world of 2018 became falsified, denied and forgotten in history?

Sadly we don't have to wait for the future for these things to happen. Right here, right now we are doing this. Works of literature are being pulled from shelves and banned because their ideology and modern day ideology don't mesh. Historic figures and symbols are being brought down and destroyed and history itself is being glossed over, reinvented or completely written out of our kids history books because we don't like what the past says about us as a people or more over, we don't want to admit that people regardless of the day and age are human and therefore capable of both good and bad. What is wrong with us? 

The fact is, our history is rich with stories of hard working people who have fought to make lives for themselves. Have we all always been on equal ground? No. Since the beginning of time, man in his desire to rise above his particular circumstance has always found it necessary to step on others and at some point in history, every race, creed and color has been viewed as "less than", property or slave labor. This goes clear back to the earliest of times. It is part of the frailty of man, the ego, the desire to have it all....regardless of who suffers. With it though, there have been great times in our history when great men fought and died for what they viewed as good and right. Every age has had its good history and it's bad and each was full of people of the time writing, drawing and living life as they saw it, felt it and existed in it. The language of the time may not be the same as ours, in fact by today's standards it might even be viewed as insensitive, disrespectful or racist.....but at that time.....it was how these people spoke to and about one another and what is seen as wrong to us now, was simply life to all back then. Good or bad it was a part of our history and something that has to be recognized not glossed over or ignored. In the words of George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." By denying and running from our past and our history, it doesn't mean we can avoid it, it simply means we are missing out on knowing key facts about what went right and what went wrong and maybe how to fix those things in the future.

When I hear of books such as the Laura Ingalls Wilder series possibly being taken from our shelves and her name being stripped from the prestigious Laura Ingalls Wilder Award because she talked about Native Americans, then known as Indians, in the only way she knew how, I am sad. Wilder wrote of what she knew back then. She was not being racist, cruel or insensitive. She was writing about a time that people of today could not possibly understand. She was writing about a life that was hard in a new nation where people were trying to find their way. In the world she knew, Indians were the enemy and to be feared. She wrote what her world at the time was like and for us to view it as more than that is simply ridiculous.

Like it or not, our history is made up of good people and bad people. It is made up of slave owners, abolitionists, free thinkers, religious zealots, the Confederate flag, outlaws, thieves, soldiers, people who stood up for what they thought was right and people who perpetuated bad for their own personal gain. And even in today's world, much of this remains. Good or bad, each day we make history. Not all of it is something to be proud of, but it is how we learn, how we grow and how we move forward.

Today we write, draw and create our world based on what we know and on what society dictates. We are leaving behind a legacy with each breath we take in hopes that the future generations can pull from the good we leave behind and understand that in our humanity we are imperfect creatures who make mistakes.....but our mistakes, just like the good we leave are part of our history and simply should not be forgotten.