Telling the Whole Story

The following is another interesting article by Tom Fiske:

Who knows the reason? I can’t remember what it was, but I joined a group of people at my church that were working on their autobiographical histories. That is, members were learning from each other how to put together their own personal life stories. They wanted to pass on to their children and grandchildren not only the bare facts their progeny would learn from their genealogies, but also the reasons for those facts.

You know—something like, “Uncle Harold got sick and died, leaving us his house in Des Moines, so we moved there during the 1940’s.” In addition members made a deliberate effort to recall mom and dad’s favorite expressions and their own as well. My father was a bit pretentious at times and might utter, “Lord love a duck!” Since he had the ability to swear prodigiously, that was more of a blessing than we realized at the time. Occasionally we made use of questionnaires that asked very probing questions. Answers to these questions led us to recall facts and stories that we hadn’t thought of in forty years.

Each time we met (for us it was twice a month) we would read what we had prepared usually since the last meeting (although some of my published works contained stories of my childhood or of my children’s life experiences). Occasionally there were suggestions for improvement, but since all of us at heart are comma movers, we seldom talked about grammar. One of my often-used comments was, “I want to know more. Please tell me more. Why did you compare your first husband to a mule?” – or some such thing. People tend to overlook interesting stories as they forge ahead to some point that is interesting only to them (perhaps a justification).

Sometimes people use the passive case too often. They might say, “Dinner was served,” rather than, “Mother cooked a fantastic meal of turkey and sweet potatoes that included a dash of Bourbon for flavor.”

I recall a man in our group who had been a general in the Eighth Air Force in Europe during WWII. There was a time when about half the American bombers in the Eighth were being shot down and lives of its young men were often quite short. He talked about staying in England and meeting English civilians, recalling quite a bit about two things—their shoes and what he ate almost every meal. Oh yes—he met several famous people also: royalty, movie stars, and General Patton among them. He seldom mentioned the danger they faced with each mission.

Another person in the autobiographical writer’s group was a German lady who had been a pretty teen-ager during the war. She was the niece of a famous rocket scientist, and as the war drew to a close in Europe, she and her sisters were captured and taken into Russia as slaves to work in the fields. She eventually escaped into Western Germany, then emigrated to Canada where she married a fellow German. Later, she moved to Southern California. When I left the group to move to another city, she was locating her elderly family and arranging visits with her sisters back into Germany. She had not seen them since 1943.

And there was another lady whose personal life was very interesting. Furthermore her husband, a doctor, led a professional life that was and still is a national secret. She was not allowed to know anything about that part of his career, either. But when he died he told her a little of it.

As a fellow member of the autobiographical writer’s group, I learned about myself as well as the other members. We had no idea that our hum-drum “every day” lives were so very interesting, if told in the right way. I am not talking about prurient details, either. I am talking about great patriotic heroism mostly for the United States, but in one case, for Germany.

These were very rich and enriching meetings.

Generally, the meetings are still available to most of us. Churches and community groups sponsor them all over the country, even today. They allot space because they know everybody has a story to tell. You don’t have to be a member of a church to belong to a group that meets in a church room, and members seldom if ever try to “convert” you, except to interesting writing.

The autobiographical narrative can be about a segment of your life or cradle to the grave. General Electric Company moved me across the country, so my life story, at least during much of my working life, was divided evenly into sets of years spent in industrial cities across the country. Determining chapters for my autobiography was easy because I had large stops and starts in it. But for someone in America who seldom moved, chapters require some thought. And the hardest problem to solve is how you combine your three main stories: your career, your family life and your faith. I have never seen a completely satisfactory method.

If it is hard to do, you might ask, “Why bother?” The dividend of a series of meetings is, of course, a notebook full of information for the generations ahead. All in all, you are passing along a message to the next generation. You want it to be concise and helpful. You learned something in all your years that could save the next generation and the one after that a great deal of trouble. Your autobiographical narrative is part of their heritage, and is a natural extension of your genealogy. Perhaps it belongs at the end of a bound genealogical record.

Your story is intensely personal by itself, but when combined with others, it becomes the history of the United States of America.

Check the Internet under the heading, “Autobiographical Narrative” for more information.

Thomas S. Fiske
Fullerton, CA
Dec. 10,2009