“Euliss’ first trade was fixing model T cars. He could tear down a model T and put it back together again, he said. The first V8 engine came out in 1932 and Euliss went to help run his dad’s filling station the next year. They ran the Amoco station for 11 years till the route salesman told them one day they had to carry only company products.
Soon, Eullis ended up in Europe in a machine shop tooling 5 inch guns for the allies. With peace, he converted from guns to bread; the bakery in Nice, France offered a château for the supervisor, so Eullis enjoyed the King’s life till 1947, with a military butler who shined his boots.”
I wrote those words in 2000. I found them today, in 2024, in an old abandoned notebook. Almost a quarter century later, I remember just vaguely the day I talked to Euliss, and as soon as I got home I jotted those fragments down and thought “I need to come back to this.” Then didn’t.
Euliss is dead now. He was an old man when we had that conversation, and you were just 2, just discovering complex sentences. You’ll never remember this old man who was your mother’s grandmother’s brother – which makes him something to you I don’t know how to compute. The genealogy chart isn’t what matters, but the broken stories do.
A thousand follow-up questions come to me now… did the V8 engine actually kill your trade? Were you drafted into the army? Were you really forced to abandon or sell the filling station? Where was this Amoco station? Tell me more about your dad – did you both enjoy working side by side every day? Was he a mechanic too? In the war, you’re in a machine shop in Europe making guns? Where was the shop? Were you in charge? Is that what you did for the whole war? And then you were discharged and you ended up staying in France? When did you come back to America? Why? What did you do after that? Did you keep in tough with other GI’s? I have a thousand more.
In fact, I think that was the only conversation I ever had with him.
Each one of these questions would have yielded a rich story. Gone now. We ignore the dying riches all around us hidden in the memories of the old ones, who usually just quietly make their way to their programmed dinner in the dining hall of the nursing home. Because nobody stops them for interviews.
Isaac: interview people, of all ages and all types, and then write it down. Make a lifelong habit of this. Get yourself a notebook, with paper that feels rich when your favorite pen touches it. Keep a journal – not for your dopey midnight feelings but for capturing what you, and only you, have: you heard a story, and here is how it sounded to you. Some Uncle Euliss for you, only his words, in only your ears. Everybody – EVERYBODY – has interesting stories. Most people don’t know they do. Almost all these stories…disappear when their authors die, and nobody heard them with the ears of love.
In a book of memories – memoriam – I’d be remiss not to ask and answer a crucial question: what is memory for? My answer to this is scattered among the actual stories in this collection and is asking to be picked up as you go. You find stories and the Theory of Story tangled together here, like blooms and roots in a garden.
Among my finest memories are of you and I walking in the woods and talking about stories, what they mean, and what Story means. How they work or don’t work, and why the elves, goblins, dragons, hobbits, and talking trees do what they do. What riches we’d lose if we didn’t have imaginary worlds to walk in. What poverty, if C.S. Lewis hadn’t badgered his friend Tolkien to keep writing down that elf story? But it’s not the famous writers; we all have so, so many stories around us, falling to the ground like leaves in Loth Lorien’s last autumn.
A book of memories might feel like simple nostalgia. A quiet longing for old places and experiences, like old people do. I don’t deny that maudlin nostalgia exists, and nostalgia as simple sadness about fading memories is, well, sad and grey. We don’t want all our mental memories to last forever, like in a dusty attic.
But: why do we do it? Why this universal need to create stories and remember stories? “Nostalgia” is a misused word; it’s a dismissal of a deeper thing, which is the imbedded need for justice toward the life God gives each of us, the justice we owe Him, to not drop minutes and days on the ground and walk on oblivious. We need to account, and this need is not extraneous to us, like a sense of obligation from fear of the Judge, but is internal in our very design. but to account.
I’m writing to you a quarter century after I heard Euliss story. My guess is you’ll come back to this a quarter century from now – or your child will – and I’ll be gone.
“Tradition” is another poorly understood word. It’s not “what we do because older people did it”. If that’s all tradition is, then youth is right to cast it off. But, as in a famous quote by William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Everyone lives in a story; it’s just that many are unaware of which story they’re a character in. Tradition is the story one wakes up in, and there’s an obligation to hand along to the young a story to wake up in.
So it’s not “either-or”, it’s “both-and”.
Literature, stories, teach us that all humans live inside a story, and in fact cannot hold to sanity when the stories are gone. In fact, what we call insanity is another word for broken story.
Do not let the stories fall to the ground.
VERSION POSTED FROM OBSIDIAN – NEED TO COMPARE
Euliss’ first trade was fixing model T cars. He could tear down a model T and put it back together again. The first V8 engine came out in 1932 and Euliss went to help run his dad’s filling station the next year. They ran the Amoco station for 11 years till the route salesman told them one day they had to carry only company products.
Soon, Eullis ended up in Europe in a machine shop tooling 5 inch guns for the allies. With peace, he converted from guns to bread; the bakery in Nice, France offered a château for the supervisor, so Eullis enjoyed the King’s life till 1947, with a military butler who shined his boots.
I wrote those words in 2000. I found them today, in 2024, in an old abandoned notebook. Almost a quarter century later, I remember just vaguely the day I talked to Euliss and jotted those fragments down. I should have asked him more.
Why did I not follow up? Euliss is dead now. He was an old man when we had that conversation. A thousand follow-up questions occur to me now… did the V8 engine actually kill your trade? Were you drafted into the army? Were you really forced to abandon or sell the filling station? Where was this Amoco station? Tell me more about your dad. In the war, you’re in a machine shop in Europe making guns? Where was the shop? Is that what you did for the whole war? And then you were discharged and you ended up staying in France? When did you come back to America? Why? What did you do after that?
In fact, I think that was the only conversation I ever had with him.
Each one of these questions would have yielded a rich story. Gone now. We ignore the dying riches all around us hidden in the memories of the old ones, who usually just quietly make their way to their programmed dinner in the dining hall of the nursing home. Because nobody stops them for interviews.
Isaac: interview people, of all ages and all types, and write it down. Make a lifelong habit of this. Everybody – EVERYBODY – has interesting stories. Most people don’t know they do. Almost all these stories…disappear when their authors die.