When a dear friend turned 50, she embraced that magical number wholeheartedly. Since we worked in side-by-side cubicles at the newspaper, we, on occasion, went to lunch together. I smiled as she stepped to the counter to place her order or when seated, spoke to the server. “I want my senior discount,” she proclaimed first before she ordered her first item.
After I turned 50, I thought of this friend every time I ordered “one senior coffee, black.” Her enthusiasm to acknowledge who she was probably gave me the nudge to take advantage of the discount. Since I passed that milestone decades ago, I’ve had lots of time to reflect on these “golden years.”
Recently, I heard a quote on Georgia Public Broadcasting that made me do a double take. On a segment of “On Second Thought,” hosted by Celeste Headlee, a young African American woman said, “I’ve always been told that when an elder dies, a library burns down and we’ve have lost all of his or her stories forever.”
Since I’m the public library’s number one fan, I researched the quote. In 1960 at a UNESCO conference, Amadou Hampate Ba Alian, a Malian writer and ethnologist (one who studies the characteristics of various peoples and the differences and relationships between them), was the first to use this African proverb in a recorded speech. Supposedly, it has become a favorite saying of American genealogists and historians, too.
My friend was a prolific writer and I’m sure her three daughters have many of the family stories recorded on paper. However sadly, in families too busy or unwilling to jot down the details of such stories, volumes are lost not only to the family, but to society as well. Now is the time to record them. Of course, celebrities, with the aid of ghost writers, pen their memoirs. But one doesn’t have to be famous to preserve the many stories worth saving.
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But telling family stories has greater implication than merely to preserve family history.
Bruce Feiler of The New York Times reports on the research of Marshall Duke, psychologist at Emory University and his colleague Robyn Fivush, based on an observance of Duke’s wife Sara, a psychologist working with children with learning disabilities. She told her husband, “The ones who know a lot about their families tend to do better when they face challenges.”
As a retired teacher, I appreciate this recognition of the anecdotal information educators glean from their students. For many of us, it leads not to a nationwide study as this one did, but to real ways for teachers to help students learn.
Duke and Fivush began to investigate his wife’s hypothesis two months before 9/11. Afterwards, they returned to their subjects of all ages, asked the same questions and compared answers.
Duke says, “Once again, the ones who knew more about their families proved to be more resilient, meaning they could moderate the effects of stress. The answers have to do with a child’s sense of being part of a larger family.”
Additional studies by other psychologists have confirmed and refined the initial findings. Feiler reports, “The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the stories of your family’s positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for generations to come.”
2017
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