February 2008
Editor's Note
Last night I decided to take an audio stroll down memory lane by listening to a few of our 71 saved phone messages. Ok, I admit this is a crude method of capturing our family memories, but no archivist has sprung up from our crop of kids, I’m hopelessly unreliable as far as journaling, my attempts at scrapbooks look like piles of scraps, I rarely remember to take videos or photographs, and my husband ran over his last camera with the car. So I just keep tossing the few photos we do manage to take into cardboard boxes (or file folders on the computer) and hitting “Save” when I hear a phone message that I want to preserve. The only “equipment” required was asking the phone company to make our voice mailbox bigger.
I admit a certain member of our household doesn’t approve of the message stockpile, so before he decides to clear it out, I need to figure out how to get these poetic fragments onto a CD or my computer (any suggestions out there from tech savy readers?). In the meantime, I’ve got easy access to a rich, if admittedly random, family oral history:
My nephew: “Hello everybody, we are calling to tell you we are looking right now at our beautiful baby girl, born two hours ago.”
My mother to her grandchild: “Lil, I just read the book you made me of your own beautiful poetry. I will always treasure this book. I am so proud of you.”
My oldest daughter: “Mom, I just walked out of my last class of the first year of medical school. Whew.”
My mom to another grandchild. “Tell Annie we hear she has a cough and we are thinking about her.”
My oldest daughter: “We are at the airport, about to catch our flight. I really can’t believe the wedding is over.”
Another daughter: “I made it. I’m in my dorm. I met my roommate. So far, it is going fine. Call me.”
Husband: “Honey, I’m done with the meeting. It’s 10:30. I’m coming home.”
Husband: “I’m getting ready to play the 18th hole. What is going on with the kids this afternoon?”
My son: “I got the job. Call me.”
The second youngest: “You guys, I am in a huge storm at Uncle JB’s house in Ohio. Everybody is gone right now except me and the rain is coming in the screened windows, getting everything, including this phone, really wet. Call me.”
My mom: “Be sure to look at the perfectly full moon tonight.”
Then there’s the messages from our youngest when she went through a certain phase at age seven that would have had us consulting the experts if it had lasted much longer. At least once a day, for almost a year, she’d use our home phone to dial our home phone number and talk to her imaginary friend “Self” when the voice message picked up:
“Hey! How are you Self? That’s good, I’m fine. Listen Self, don’t tell anybody, but I do not like my big sister at all anymore.”
“Hey Self what’s up? My stinky brother is really bothering me. How was your day? I had the worst day of my life. Can I come over to see you?”
“Hey Self, guess what? I am going to camp! You are too! That is so great!”
“Hi Self. You know I really do like you better than anybody. You’re my best friend, Self.”
Most of the time, when I strain to look behind me at a
day in our life long past, it is a hazy, incomplete picture, but our replayed
messages bring it all into focus with a snap. Certain words strung together
by a familiar voice set off widening rings of vivid memories, like a rock
getting tossed in a pond sending out ripples in all directions.
Ann Bergman, Editor/Publisher
abergman@seattleschild.com
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