I decided to return to my blog today after a long absence. It seems fitting, since I began this blog in the year I retired from teaching, and this year marks the first year of actual retirement from paid work, a transition which hasn't always been easy for me and I don't mean that in the financial sense, rather in the emotional or overthinking sense, whichever way you look at it. Perhaps my return to the blog marks my apparent coming to terms with the fact that I have all this TIME on my hands and I'm beginning to be okay with that. And, of course, it's the political season again, and there's much to comment on. Not that I'm going to go there today, though.
Some of my ponderings today have to do with why I've undergone this transition to feeling good about my life without paid work. A lot of it has to do with actually embracing the idea that I've had a lot of projects I've wanted to work on in two realms, writing/thinking and organization/sorting/disposal of a ton of family "stuff" which has come to roost at my house. I thank my son for reminding me of that, at a point where I had concluded that I needed to give myself an "assignment" otherwise I was in danger of frittering away the rest of my life. So......I decided to begin with a focus on my oldest brother, Rob's, letters with an eye toward writing about his life. He died in 1988, and in 1996 I actually conceived of a book based on his life, and took some preliminary steps to begin that, but then life and work got in the way.
Since I had loved working on my great grandmother's and great great grandmother's letters which were published by U.of Iowa in 1996, I knew I would enjoy such a project again, and it would enable me to write, think and start to sort family memorabilia, all at the same time. I now have a thick, 3-ring binder sitting beside my laptop, containing only the letters from his first year at Dartmouth, open to the next letter to read and write notes about. I'm only up to Oct. 31st, 1957 and I have already identified several recurring themes and raised several questions.
I've quickly realized, that one of the aspects of pursuing this project is that I will learn a lot about others in my family and have an opportunity to revisit my own life as I think about his. He was 8 years older than I, and so when he went off to college, I was only 10, almost 11 years old. I didn't know him very well, then, and I surely didn't spend much time thinking about what he was experiencing in college. From this vantage point, and now having been through the college experience and a lot more life experience since, I am able to read his letters within the historical and cultural context of the time period, and with much more knowledge about him as I knew him better later in his life.
Reading through these letters makes me miss him in a way that I haven't so much in recent years. There are so many questions I would like to ask him, and so much that is going on today that I would like to talk about with him about. I think this is a common lament of people who write about family members who have died. Why didn't I ask such and such when I could have? What was that story that X used to tell, but I didn't write down? In most ways, however, his letters will answer many of those questions for me.
And that brings me to the final point/question I have raised so many times as I have contemplated the boxes of letters, scrapbooks, photo albums and file folders I have inherited over the years: Why did my family become such savers of letters, in particular? That question is especially focused on the Redington (paternal) side of my family. My dad saved all of our letters home from college and wherever we may have been in the years after. In my brother, Rob's case, he also had a whole file of what he identified as "1957 Summer Prelims Before Leaving for Hanover" which includes lots of interesting documents for the researcher like me. Though mom was the apparently sentimental one of my parents, what does it say about dad that he kept all this stuff? And what does it say for all of us now that we are in the ephemeral email era? Conducting research into a person's life will be much more difficult, that I can say for sure. I'd like to think that we might pay more attention to our family members and our familial relationships in the present moment, and like Harriet the Spy, take notes.....or possibly create electronic blogs. . .
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