Topic: Nostalgia
The recent death of my mother has, perhaps predictably, caused me to realize how much about her life I don’t know, and now will probably never know. I waited too long to ask her questions I should have asked years ago, or waited too long to write down the things she told me while they were fresh in my mind. Now I question the veracity of so much of my recollection of her stories and Italian Terror Tales™.
All of this has set me on a sort of quest to construct a narrative of our family and my own life, to revisit the past, not for the sake of nostalgia necessarily, but to sort of figure out where we come from and where we are, in the geographical, historical, and emotional senses.
As part of this, I have started to create a family story...I started by poring over old photo albums and documenting when the family was where. That done, I asked for input from my brother and my sister in trying to flesh it out. First to fill in the whens and wheres, and then to start filling in the stories and recollections. My brother tells me of the circumstances in which we lost our house is El Paso, and my sister reminds me of stories related to the only time she and I saw one of our grandparents; we, infant and toddler, she, on her deathbed.
One thing I have had some success in is reconnecting with a few people from younger days...a neighbors and friends and schoolmates. Fun, but not necessarily enlightening. It’s from the family where the real gems come.
