Tell Me a Bob Story Posted 3-24-09

Four and a half decades ago,  my best friend was killed in an automobile accident. After Bob died, I drove his wife home from the hospital. Stacked on their kitchen table were gifts for their son's seventh birthday. She had the horrible task of saying, “Happy birthday, and, incidentally, your daddy's dead.”

Down through the years, I maintained contact with the pair. The mother is now gone. The son and I are separated by thousands of miles, but via modern electronics we still communicate. Through the decades, the son keeps asking the same question, “Have you any new Bob stories?” Whenever I think of something, I write out the story and email it to him. These are all kept as sacred relics.

Histories are important elements in maintaining the integrity of family groups Their stories should be recorded in something more lasting than fleeting human memories. This can be done in many ways. Journaling is a popular method of family records-keeping. Simple recording of dates and events in a spiral notebook or three-ring binder helps.

When I started writing a novel, which was set in Korea at about the same time as I was there, I remembered that my mother had given me a shoe box full of my letters from Korea. I dug out the letters and spent several evenings reviewing my past. (My, I was an arrogant young whelp!) However, those letters brought back a flood of memories, that had escaped from me over the years. I am certain those revived memories substantially contributed to the success of the book.

My mother also saved ten years of letters from my sojourn to Mexico. When I get around to placing the site of a novel south of the border, I will have a vast quantity of background material available to me.

In a number of families I have known, there is one member, who is the designated family historian. Information of value to the group is shuttled to him or her for preservation.

Another family has a designated recipe-keeper, so if you feel the want to bake grandma's fabulous Toll House cookies or cook Uncle Luigi’s cioppino, the recipes are available.

One method of records keeping that I have found useful is to corral, into three-ring binders, all those little bits and pieces of paper that are usually tossed into a drawer or box, where until they become so tattered and torn that they are ultimately thrown away. I have filled several binders with those little scraps, either taped or stapled to sheets of paper. If the piece itself is large enough, I punch holes in it for direct insertion into the binder.

Those volumes contain such items as my brother's obituary, birth announcements, vacation mementos, jotted- down ideas I've had and annual letters from family members reviewing their adventures and misadventures for the year. This is also where I write notes concerning things I have heard or seen that warrant recording for future use.

If I had started this binder system earlier, I probably would have had more stories to pass on to Bob’s son. Occasionally, something will jog the memory sufficiently to bring a Bob story to the surface.

This isn't as neat as if I had made either physical or electronic files, for the various categories of activities and faithfully kept everything current. However, I am not driven in that direction, so my binders work fine for me.