Stories from the Past Help Plot the Future

Photo from the Nixon Library

Lost in a busy week of worry about Kim Kardashian's fragile marriage, Rick Perry's memory lapses and Jerry Sandusky's indiscretions is the news that Richard Nixon believed the 18 minute gap in the White House tapes was created accidentally. The National Archives and the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California have released an enormous amount of material in response to an order from a federal court that took the unusual action of opening the files of a grand jury investigation. The mere fact that the action was taken demonstrates the importance of the testimony to the historical record.

It would be fair to say that the editors of a web site that deals with making stories available would be delighted to have this material as part of the public record, and we are. Credit to the archivists who went beyond the minimum to include a list of audio recordings as mp3 files along with the list of pdf's of documents, court records and evidence gathered by the grand jury. Four dictabelts containing a lengthy memorandum dictated for H.R. Haldeman about Nixon's early morning excursion to the Lincoln Memorial where he had a non-confrontational exchange with students gathering in protest of the bombing of Cambodian supply lines were just released.

Stories Matter - Even If You Think They Don't

 

For three weeks in September, I attended a memoir writing class with a group of women at a retirement community. I attended this class to introduce this group of people to www.storychip.com. My notion was that as soon as people who have lived long enough and like to write, find out about Story Chip, they would be flocking to the site, eagerly pouring out a lifetime’s worth of stories. I believed that I was offering my fellow classmates and their friends, relatives and fellow residents, a great opportunity to share the great wealth of their experiences. I was wrong.

I was not wrong about offering them a great opportunity to share the great wealth of their experiences. At Story Chip, history is told from the original stories of the people who experienced it. It is a website where anyone can post a story. Their story will not be edited, and we do not pick and choose from the submissions – they are all posted. Each little piece of history is important. Each of us participates in history in our own small way and each of us has a lifetime’s worth of stories to tell.

Who I Met on Summer Vacation

National Cathedral before the quake

Story Chip's editors have logged a lot miles this summer. We have driven from the west coast through Arizona when the smoke from the wildfire there was so heavy that you could not see the road. We were in Abiquiu, New Mexico just before the fires that forced the evacuation of Los Alamos. We were in Santa Fe when the fire began in the mountains north of town. We have seen prairie fires all over Texas in the worst drought on record there. We visited the National Cathedral weeks before the earthquake damaged many of its spires. We were in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware just before Irene swept past en route to landfall near Cape May, New Jersey. We have traveled across Pennsylvania and New York en route to Ontario.

It has been a tough year for our uneasy relationship with mother nature. Starting with the floods and tornadoes that razed places that we used to live, going through drought and fire to finish with earthquake and hurricane. Now, back in Austin, we are in the middle the central Texas fire season. All of these natural disasters take center stage on the nightly news, but for us this summer has been about the people and their stories. Events grab the headlines, but people make events real. Some travel pictures after the jump.

Earthquake in DC

When the house started to shake and roll, my 90 year old mother went to look outside to see if Hurricane Irene was arriving days ahead of predictions. She lived her entire life in the area affected by the 5.8 magnitude earthquake and had not experienced one before. She had no reference for understanding the rattling of the earth around her.

One of my sisters, who also lives in the D.C. Area, has lived in California for a number of years and she recognized the event correctly and quickly. My sister was able to share a laugh with her over their very different levels of experience and the fact that no real damage was done. 

Is it an Allegory or a Credit Rating?

During the debate about raising the debt ceiling, a group of Tea Party Republicans seemed confident that having the country's credit rating downgraded would not be the catastrophe that many had suggested. Did they see an allegorical path to political advantage? or did they just assume that the White House and Treasury Department had enough employees to handle the flood of phone calls from the Chinese asking when they could expect the next payment. The image of a small army of Chinese call center workers calling the Treasury Secretary every couple of hours should be enough but the real question is what does a credit rating mean?

How to Bury a Cowboy Hat

[a week after writing this post, I heard a program about the late Janis Joplin on KUT in Austin, Texas. It included a version of Happy Trails recorded as a birthday greeting for John Lennon. It was the last recording she made before her death. A worthy candidate.]

Prominently displayed in the window of Horse Feathers in Taos, New Mexico is a sign that promises a decent burial for a hat that has been well loved but can no longer serve its partner. As part of the service, Horsefeathers promises that one hymn will be included. I happen to be the proud partner of a straw hat that has many hoof prints, a menagerie of unusual stains and no discernible shape that has sequestered itself in the trunk of my car rather than allow itself to be seen in such deplorable condition. I have long considered putting the haberdashery down but thoughts of a dumpster burial for such a long term companion carry only a sense of revulsion.

A word about the Horse Feathers emporium might be helpful here as it will allow insight into my feeling that I had found the noble end to a valiant friend. Other signs promise previously “loved” cowboy hats and boots. The sense of respect for the accouterments of cowboying is everywhere from the storefront to the shops interior rigging. Lifetimes devoted working and caring for large animals are reduced to displays of the essential tools of the profession. Hats and boots are the symbolic testimony to the west and the lore of the cowboy. The storefront is a fair representation of what is on the inside.

Graduation Rituals and Fathers Day (last time)

Mothers Day, Fathers Day and Graduation Day are all spring rituals, days that allow us to generate more stories that define a culture. Like many of our rituals, it seems that the more we spend on the occasion, the less it means. Conan O'Brien recently gave the commencement address at Dartmouth College and congratulated the graduates by pointing out that they had achieved something that only 92 per cent of their peers had done. If he had been talking to a high school graduating class, he would have been closer to the right number, but his observation remains valid.

There are still a couple of days to add your Fathers Day stories to Story Chip before we begin the early celebration period of the day in 2012. This is certainly a chance for new graduates to thank their parents in a manner commensurate with the completion of a 4 year degree and your story is likely to be better received than the commencement address your parents heard while you were graduating, unless of course you went to Dartmouth. 

Road to Father's Day Stories

Some fathers never tell their stories. Some, like Michael Sullivan in Road to Perdition, keep their professional life separate from their family life as a protection. Most of us do not have excuses of such dramatic proportion but there are an ever large number of men and women who have divorced and find their stories lost or ignored in the emotion of separating a marriage with children. Many marriages end with the adults' alienation thrust into the core history of the children.

Parental Alienation Syndrome, PAS, was first described in the 1980's when therapists started seeing children of divorced families who were severely alienated from one of the parents for little or no apparent reason. Dr. Richard Gardner wrote the first articles and continues to be vilified and praised almost 10 years after his death. The scientific validity of PAS likely would not be such a big issue if it had not made its way into the same custody battles that foster the condition to begin with.

Hey Dad, Tell me the story about the time

Political correctness, thought police and intellectual terrorism are synonyms. The difference is how much we want the term to be socially accepted. Before technology allowed instant international communication, it was possible to have regional meanings for words and phrases and the need to control the perceptions of others focused on the people around us. Those days are over. Words are not the thing they represent. They are a symbolic presentation of a lifetime's experience and what we mean when we use words will change as are experience changes. Obviously, with words being so imprecise, we compensate to overcome the lack of clarity. Storytelling puts our experience into the words that we choose and helps to make our messages easier to understand.

I am a father. Keep that sentence to the strict biological definition and there are no problems, but as soon as you allow memories of your parents or your child rearing years to spice the conversation, the word has left the simple sentence behind. One of the reasons that we celebrate Mother's Day and Father's Day is to make the effort to honor the ritual meaning of mother and father and again, we do this by telling stories. The stories we tell define what we are as a culture; the values that hold us together as a society. This year, memories of fathers get more difficult for me with each super cell that spins destruction across the nation's midsection. Since each of us is greater than the sum of our stories, my experiences as a father, as a graduate student at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and several close encounters with tornadoes are essential to know what I mean when I say that I am a father.

Calculating the Value of Education Involves the Sum of the Stories

A friend is retiring from his counselling practice after 40 years, much of it spent working with fathers' difficulties relating to their children after divorces. His success provided him many opportunities to present his approaches and techniques to various groups across the country. He was encouraged by colleagues to write his techniques and present them to universities where the approach could be shared with students preparing for careers in counselling. He prepared the material and sent it to faculties at several institutions in the hopes of sharing his experience. He was told politely that his models were oriented to men and did not fit with the current view that a reliance on “male perspective” was detrimental to women and, regardless of the practical success, it could not be a part of a university curriculum.

Anecdotes of education are everywhere this time of year as students mark achievements and many include the influence of politically correct education. All of those stories of academic success are tempered this year with the stories of the debts incurred while earning those degrees. When Peter Thiel added his voice to the growing concern that the next financial bubble will be student loans, a new thread of stories has been added that questions the value of a college education. Federal policy supporting student loans may be the new flash point in our current economic malaise and political conversation is now being painted in stories that have the theme “a college education is not worth it.” Reducing the dynamic economic issues to stories of students that support a particular political view can be seen in blogs like Beneath the Wheel:

Sadly, this downward spiral is primarily an issue that can only be addressed by the liberal Democrats. The Republican right has failed at every subject save for law and finance, and prefers an illiterate population it can more easily manipulate through flawed logic and reasoning. Hence the propensity to cut public education, especially for those in greatest need.

Terrorism of the body and the Mind

The past ten days scattered our attention and focused my thoughts on the reason for Story Chip. Osama Bin Laden's death and the wave of spin coming from Washington, complaints about the use of the word “Geronimo” as a code by the Navy seals, the resignation of the President of the American College of Surgeons and Sprint pulling an advertisement showing a man in red dress all demonstrate how desperately we cling to the meaning of events and symbols. We fight to preserve the “proper” interpretation from our point of view. We make every effort to control the perceptions of others.

Collecting the stories, the history, of individuals serves an understanding that we can never control what others think. At best, we manage opportunities to negotiate the meaning of our lives. We negotiate from our experiences by telling our stories with the hope that lessons learned will survive and shape the future. Each of the stories in Story Chip provides a taste of someone's struggle to understand and maintain their own meaning and relationship to their culture.

A mother's Story Chip that is only partly written

Over wine and pizza, the discussion turned to mother's day and more particularly, mother's. There was no agreement on anything during that conversation except that all of us had a different experience with our mothers and very different memories and of course it did not help that half of the participants in the conversation were mothers themselves or that only one of us had a mother that was still living.

There are so many stories of what it means to be a parent and how much that has changed in the last fifty years. The fragile nature of these stories came back to me while helping a friend clear the remaining furniture and keepsakes from the home of her aunt who had recently passed away. Among the final pieces was this yarn on canvas still life.

On the back, printed on the brown kraft frame backing, was the following description:

This was done during the summer of 1973, while watching the Watergate hearings on television.

When you look at this, remember the corruption, burglary, perjury that took place in the name of a higher cause, i.e. the re-election of Richard Nixon.

Was this a mother's story? An artist's? Story Chip exists to record these stories. 

Already on Story Chip:

A mother who lost her son in an accident

A woman that keeps the memories alive

A Thanksgiving trip with mom

Artist and mother

By the way, you are invited to share your stories of your mother on Story Chip. She will love your thinking of her.

First Post

Story Chip is still a growing experiment in not entirely social media with both Twitter and Facebook identities that just do not address all situations. Our blog may well become our soap box to promote the value of all the stories that can be told in a format the encourages universal participation. We would all like to be able to control how our stories are told, but events and perspectives make that impossible. For example, this week marks the anniversary of the arrest of John Scopes for teaching evolution in Tennessee. What do we remember of John Scopes? How do modern Republicans feel about the fact that it was the Democrats that defended the biblical version at that trial? Has this story gotten lost in the depictions on stage and film?

While many of the stories from Dayton, TN are lost, each day provides new opportunities of inclusion of people and their stories. Behind the headlines about the death of Osama bin Laden is the Apache demand for an apology from the Navy for using "Geronimo" as a code word for communicating the status of the team's effort in Afghanistan. Geronimo has been the subject of so many movies and books that it is unlikely that one more story will have a huge impact on how he is seen. What story are the tribal leaders hoping to protect? What are the stories that still need to be told?

At Story Chip, we do not pretend that there is one version, a single "true" story of a person or an event, and we have no delusions about "setting the record straight". Our hope is that by offering a forum for telling the stories of our lives that a richer and dynamic understanding be available. Where are the stories of John Scopes family and how that trial changed their lives? Can we share the stories of the Apache tribes to better understand the times that created a legendary figure?

This blog will focus on the need and processes for collecting our histories and sharing them.