One of the participants in my memoir-writing class remembered reading Little Toot by Hardie Gramatky, a 1939 classic children’s book about a courageous little tugboat, to her four-year-old son. It became his favorite book, and he demanded that she read it nearly every night for about a year. “I guess it’s true that literature has great power,” she said, “because he was fascinated by boats from then on. In fact he made them his life’s work – he’s now the captain of a ferry boat!”

What did your mom read to you when you were young? How did that book affect you? Or … what are you reading to your children or grandchildren right now?

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After dinners at our large tribal gatherings on Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July, while my cousins and siblings ran playing and screaming around the house, I was usually hiding under the dinner table listening to the adults, my parents, aunts and uncles, and grandparents, talk. Because I was hidden by the long white tablecloth, they didn’t know I was there, and freed from the inhibition “not in front of the children!” they would tell the real stories of their lives. Beer, wine and scotch would be poured, and sex and death and scandal would ricochet around the table. Long standing jokes would be resurrected and laughed over again. Speculation and opinions about old family mysteries would be offered up and argued over. Politics, religion, history and wars: no topics were taboo. Since my family was filled with loud, passionate people, the stories tended to be juicy.

Although I didn’t recognize it at the time, all the great themes of the mid-20th century played out around those Thanksgiving dinner tables. My father and his brothers told war stories from Italy and the South Pacific and Korea. My mother and aunts told of sugar rationing, clothing coupons, factory work, and the mind-numbing effects of the 1950s on housewives. They marveled over “miracles” such as penicillin, the polio vaccine and (in hushed voices) the birth control pill. They worried about the Russians getting ahead in the Space Race, and the spread of communism. They rejoiced over modern conveniences such as easy-to-fix packaged food, and speculated darkly on the dangerous effects of Elvis Presley or Chubby Checker’s Twist on impressionable young minds.

Most of us tend to see “history” as something that happens to us. But the truth is that we ourselves, each of us, contribute to and participate in history. We are actors, not just reactors.

Don’t make your kids hide underneath the dinner table in order to know what you really feel and think, or what you have really done and seen. Share your stories with them.

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I like genealogists. When I give talks to genealogical societies I applaud them for digging up all those great dates and places that belong to people of the past. And then I ask them to please not forget the stories that go with them.

Genealogists are good at looking back. But they also need to think forward – to the genealogists of the future. After all, in two hundred years someone might come looking for you. What do you want them to find? Just your name and the dates you were born and died, maybe the city you lived in? Isn’t there more to you than that?

Remember that your life too, is part of the historical record. For instance, let’s suppose your great-great-great-grandfather was born in Harlem in 1828 and died in Brooklyn in 1888. That’s what the genealogists could tell you. But what was your g-g-g-grandfather doing for those sixty years he was on the earth? In 1860 he was 32 years old and probably voted in the presidential election of 1860. Who did he vote for? Was he a supporter of Abe Lincoln, or was he angry that William Seward of New York didn’t get the Republican nomination? Or did he just not care? Wouldn’t it be great if he had written some of his thoughts down?

If he didn’t, it’s too late now. But it’s not too late for you.

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The concept of history seems to be exclusively human. Animals don’t care about history. They live in the moment only. (At least as far as we know; we must always keep in mind that we’ve been wrong about animals before.)

But our relationship with the other creatures who share our planet is part of our history. It’s a part worth exploring. The way we see animals has changed radically in the last twenty years. Animals are now used in a wide variety of healing work with humans. Perhaps you were part of this societal change?

I remember a story a woman told me about her mother and a Pekinese. About twenty years ago “Maryanne” helped her mother move into a nursing home. “When Mom first moved there,” said Maryanne, “she was very depressed. She wouldn’t even get dressed, but just sat on her bed staring out the window, all day long. But then the nursing home started an animal visitor program. All her life Mom had loved Pekinese dogs – she must have owned and trained at least twenty throughout her life. One morning she was sitting on her bed staring out the window when her door opened and in trots this little honey-colored Pekinese with a blue bow in her hair. Mom just opened her arms and that little dog jumped right in them, as if she had known Mom all her life. When she left, Mom was smiling, and the next day she got dressed.”

How have animals changed your life? How have you changed theirs? Share their history.

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My last post told a story about how the movie On the Waterfront affected a woman’s choice of career. Powerful movies such as this often have unexpected consequences on viewers, although not all of them are so deep and meaningful. Here’s another story from a class participant about the same movie:

“Diane” remembered going to see On the Waterfront when she was a teenager in the fifties. “I was pretty excited,” she wrote. “Not because I wanted to see the movie but because it was my very first date with this cute boy I’d had a crush on for a long time. I was so happy when he finally asked me out.

“He was a Brando fan, and was amazed when I said I had never seen any of Brando’s movies. He looked at me with pity and told me he would educate me on what good film was all about. I was young, and he was cute, so this patronizing remark didn’t offend me at the time.

“But his choice of movie turned out to be a mistake, because I was overwhelmed by how beautiful and powerful Marlon Brando was. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, and suddenly my date didn’t seem quite as cute. In fact, he seemed downright boring compared with Brando, and my crush died a swift and complete death.

“It’s a good thing, too. Some years later I ran into my old date, and he wasn’t cute in any way – paunchy and balding – but he was still downright boring. I’ll always be grateful to Marlon Brando for breaking us up.”

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It’s said that art reflects life. It does, of course, but sometimes life’s experiences are caused by art. This is true of any art, but one of the most fun to write about is the movies. Sometimes watching a movie can affect our lives in profound ways. To illustrate, here’s a story told to me by one of the participants in my “Making History” classes.

“My father was a longshoreman in the 1950s and 60s, shared “Sally” (not her real name.) “When I was young I never really knew what a longshoreman did. It was just where Dad went every day, and it didn’t matter to me. I saw my father as an uneducated man and I didn’t want to be like him at all. We had nothing in common.

“My parents scrimped and saved to send me to college, although I didn’t know about the scrimping and saving until later. I thought college was my due. I dated college boys, and I was ashamed of my longshoreman father, who laughed too loud and drank too much beer and only read the sports page of the paper.

“When he went out on strike I felt that he had done it to spite me. All it meant to me was there was less money. I was a senior in high school, and I thought the strike was stupid. Nobody is making you be a longshoreman – if you don’t like it, then why don’t you just quit? I didn’t have the nerve to actually say this to him, but it’s what I thought.

“Oh, I was a spoiled you-know-what, all right. Why my parents didn’t bat me down to size I don’t know.

“It wasn’t until I was a sophomore in college that I had an epiphany about my dad. One Saturday night I didn’t have a date, so as I sat in the lounge at my college dorm feeling sorry for myself, I turned on the black and white TV and began watching an old movie, On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando, which I had never seen before.

“That movie changed me. I saw how longshoremen were treated. I looked at those rough men and I saw my father, working at that difficult job day after day, for poor pay and little respect, not even from his own daughter, just so I could have something better.

“I cried throughout most of the movie, tears of shame, and tears of anger. But at the end, when a bloody Brando walks up that gangway, I was standing up and cheering, all alone in the deserted dateless dorm.

“By the end of that semester, I had changed my major to economics, and after college I got a job working for a union, starting as a part-time secretary. I worked for the union for 36 years, and whenever I wondered why I stayed with them for so long, all I had to do was close my eyes and see my father working on the docks alongside Brando. I like to think I’m doing my part. I know whose side I’m on. My dad’s side. “

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There really is nothing quite so funny as the clothes worn by your parents’ generation. I remember laughing at the wide-skirted dresses my mother wore in the 1950s, especially the one with huge pink polka dots. I swore I would never dress so badly and embarrass my kids.

Ah, but the late sixties, when I was a teenager – now there was a fashionable era! I remember the boots I wore in 1968. They were dark brown leather and came up to my knees, hugging my legs so tightly they made my legs sweat. They had 3 inch heels so that when I walked across campus they made a clip-clop sound like the hooves of horses, a comforting stylish rhythm – here comes someone really cool, they said. The brown boots went good with my bell bottom jeans and my leather jacket with fringes that nearly always got caught in my backpack – although it never occurred to me to remove the fringes – what was a little inconvenience compared to fashion? Besides, this was way before my kids were born, so no one was laughing at me. We all looked like that.

My kids were born during the mid to late seventies, and when I look back at what I was wearing then, even I am embarrassed. Do you remember (shudder) polyester pants suits and paisley shirts with big wide collars? My kids look at photos of our family in those years and they literally howl.

But in the eighties and nineties, my kids were old enough to advise me on fashionable dress even when they were wearing Metallica t-shirts and leg-warmers. And not one word did they say when I wore business suits with padded shoulders to work. I had a stock of shoulder pads in my underwear drawer. Why did we think we needed to look like football players?

Now my kids have kids, even though their kids are still at the stage when they think their parents are cool and try to emulate them. Just wait, though. They’ll be laughed at soon enough. And maybe I will be cool again.

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Are you writing memoir? If you are, a juicy storehouse of memory can be found in “first times.” We never forget the first time we did something, saw something, heard something, felt something. First times have long shelf lives; they often stay fresh forever. Sit down to write about one of your first times. Start with “I remember …” Here’s one of my memories, of a first love.

I remember an old twelve string guitar, its polish scratched by the long fingernails of my first love, a marijuana-clouded musician dressed in tattered jeans and a tie-dyed shirt. His hair fell over his eyes and down his back in cascades of disgust for the establishment, while he played the guitar with single-minded concentration. His eyes were dark and intense despite the numbing effects of the joint hanging out of his mouth.

I remember what it was to be young and tempestuous, passionate about the truth and furious about the lies we were told by those we had trusted not to betray us. My favorite songs were heavy with E-flat and A-flat, minor chords which echoed the sadness and betrayal of those times, the great late-sixties.

First loves may betray you too. I wish he hadn’t. I wish his hair had stayed black and lustrous forever, but I know, even though he is long gone from my life, that now it is gray. I know his face is now lined with his own failures and his own lies.

I wish we could wipe the surface of the guitar clean of scratches and rings where beer cans once stood, and someone would again play songs that no one had ever heard before. I wish we could once more strum the anthems of hope and despair. I wish we did not live to see both the dawn and dusk of the Age of Aquarius.

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I remember watching Chet Huntley and David Brinkley on the network nightly news, even though I was in grade school at the time. My father watched them every night, and insisted that everyone else watch too — my mother, me, and even my little brother. At first my brother thought this was a great privilege, to be able to watch a grown up program with Dad. But he soon became bored and squirmed all through the show. Still, Dad insisted he be in the room, because Dad thought watching the news was a way to understand your country’s history. He believed children should have their minds stretched as far as possible, at every available opportunity.

I actually liked watching Huntley/Brinkley, not because I was interested in the news or in either of those (to me) old and boring men, but because during the commercials my father would discuss what we had just heard, and he directed most of his remarks to me – and then listened to my replies. And although most of my remarks must have been very funny, I don’t remember him ever laughing at me. Instead I felt flattered that he wanted my opinion. So I started really watching the news just so I could have an opinion to share.

Dad was a wily old fox. Also a good father. Who knows, if I hadn’t watched Huntley Brinkley when I was a child, maybe I wouldn’t have developed the love of history that has informed and blessed my life.

If you’d care to share a story about this topic, please leave a comment here. At the end of each month I’ll gather up the Sharing History comments and pick one at random from a drawing, and send the winner of the drawing my e-book: your choice of a Making History Workbook.

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Michele Obama is a glamorous woman, and reminds many people of another glamorous First Lady, Jackie Kennedy. Many women in my “Making History” classes have written about the effect Jackie Kennedy had on them, nearly fifty years ago. Here is one of my favorites:

“Sherry” shared her admiration for the new First Lady in the early sixties, motivating her volunteer work for a Washington DC Arts project headed by Mrs. Kennedy. As a thank you, Jackie Kennedy invited the volunteers, all 500 of them, to a White House Tea. Although Sherry was seven months pregnant at the time, she was determined to attend – after all, how many times would Jackie Kennedy ask her to tea?

The tea was held in the Red Room, where they were served dainty puff pastry stuffed with tuna pate, made by the French chef Jackie had imported into the White House. Carrying her teacup and plate of pastry, Sherry gingerly sat down on a delicate antique red-plush sofa. The sofa was not comfortable for a pregnant woman, so she struggled to get up, balancing her teacup, plate, and outsized abdomen. To help herself, she grasped the wooden arm of the sofa and pushed off.

Imagine her horror when the arm came off in her hand! She immediately sat down again, hoping no one had seen. But how could she fix the sofa, she wondered desperately. Showing the resourcefulness and creativity that made her such an outstanding volunteer, she stuck the arm back into its socket using tuna pate as glue! As far as she knew, it was never discovered.

If you’d care to share a story about this topic, please leave a comment here. At the end of each month I’ll gather up the Sharing History comments and pick one at random from a drawing, and send the winner of the drawing my e-book: your choice of a Making History Workbook.

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