My mother passed away this spring at the age of 86. She had lived her life exactly as she wanted, with few, if any regrets. It was hard to begrudge her departure. Her world was shrinking due to failing eyesight, nerve pain, and cancer. But it wasn’t shrinking only in the metaphorical sense. Her community was literally shrinking. Friends and family died faster than she could replace them with new great grandchildren or new friends. She thought I didn’t understand her nostalgia, but I had an inkling…
Fifteen years ago, my parents downsized. They chose me, with no dissent from my brothers, as “Descendent Most Likely To Do The Right Thing With Stuff Like This”1—and dropped off a few cartons. One day years later, I screwed up my courage and opened a box. Inside, as it turned out, were about 900 personal letters written between 1940 and 1995. The letters were the surviving relics of a Round Robin correspondence between my paternal grandparents and Gramp’s ten siblings. By happenstance, they were arranged with the most recent letters on top of the pile. I began to read.
The letters contained both hilarity and heartbreak. All the important, and sometimes minor, characters came to life as the writers fleshed out their communities and relationships. I was surprised at how clearly I could hear the voices of those I had known. After an hour or two at the kitchen table, reading my way down through the pile, I would stop to stretch or glance at the clock—and feel slightly disoriented. David McCullough, Pulitzer Prize winning biographer, noted in a 1992 New York Times interview that when people asked him if he’s working on a book, he tried to explain that he felt like he works in the book. “It’s like putting myself under a spell. And this spell, if you will, is so real to me… It’s almost like hypnosis.” I could relate. It was like coming up for air, after being submerged in a deep pool for a long time. Or perhaps it was more like returning home, after going on a long trip. In a way, I was time-traveling. And because I read the letters in reverse order, my parents’ world was repopulating. The dead were coming alive, and everyone was getting younger.
As the people were getting younger, technology was receding. One aunt reported on the marvel of a long-distance phone call. The “TV fever” infected Gramp; after three years of watching the prices drop, he decided to buy one and see if he liked it. Grandma shared the sad news that the neighbor lady had contracted polio. Another aunt mentioned putting up hay—she drove the team of horses that summer.
As technology was receding in these letters, world history was becoming current events. Nixon resigned. A nephew’s ROTC drill was cancelled because demonstrators swarmed the cadets. Kennedy was assassinated. Khrushchev visited Iowa—Iowa! What a spectacle! Tires were rationed, as was gasoline—a big problem for Gramp, the traveling book salesman. Pearl Harbor was bombed. There were worries that never materialized, and other events that were more consequential than they realized at the time.
Although this batch of letters was not written by my mother’s family, reading through them backwards I could appreciate—to the extent it is possible for a daughter who is twenty-five years behind her mother’s journey to understand—the world my mother missed. Most of all, she missed the people of her youth and middle age. But she also missed the times. Today, mention the Good Old Days, and one is reminded that things weren’t so great Back Then. With a purely objective and rational accounting, that is true in many respects. But my mother would have happily given up her television (especially since it now required three remotes, none of which she could see well enough to use, even if she had figured out which was for what…) to listen to the radio with her siblings on Sunday night. She would have gladly lived without central air-conditioning, if she could sit on the big front porch on hot summer evenings and exchange pleasantries with the neighbors who were out strolling to escape the heat of their own homes. She would have tossed her cell phone in a minute to be able to exchange letters with her dearly departed friends. Attempting to dismiss nostalgia is a fool’s errand.
Lately, I’ve been spending an hour each afternoon with my father…although he died ten years ago this month. I’m reading through the weekly letters he wrote his mother. She must have saved every one of them. The earliest is a postcard dated July of 1944 mailed from his uncle’s farm in Harcourt, Iowa. At age nine, he had traveled alone from Des Moines on the interurban train. “Dear Mom. I am going to stay through threshing. … I will write later to tell what day and time I am coming home. … I helped Harvey cut oats.”
My grandchildren will not receive an inheritance of letters, because my sons and I do not exchange letters. Whenever a thought pops into our minds, we text each other…and that’s really nice for many reasons. But we don’t curate and edit the stories of our own lives, committing them to ink and paper. Maybe that’s OK. I think of the hours I’ve spent immersed in the lives of my ancestors, instead of living my own life in the present.
But…it has been such a delight to spend these recent afternoons with my dad. He is not ravaged by Parkinson’s Disease. He is young, and healthy, and his whole life lies ahead of him.
Perhaps I, too, am hypnotized by the spell of nostalgia.
________
1 I donated all 900 Round Robin letters, along with a summary, to the Archives Department of the Parks Library at Iowa State University. The gift is a firsthand account of life in the cities, small towns, and farms of Iowa during the middle of the 20th century. I was surprised to feel emotional after I delivered the letters, but consoled myself with the idea that the “robins” had landed in a safe nest. I still have several unopened cartons here at home…
