Recovering Your Life Story

In your early to mid twenties you probably remembered just about everything that had ever happened to you—or at least it seemed that way.  You could recall the name of your third grade teacher, for instance, or the next door neighbors in Pittsburgh whose dogs constantly left unwelcome gifts in your mother's dahlias.

But by the time you reach forty-five, say, or fifty, or (heaven forfend!) even sixty, it's a different story.  You may find things missing from your personal time line.  Sure, you can remember where you worked in 1979 and where you lived, but you can no longer evoke Christmas of 1986 or your birthday that year. 

Yet this time doesn't need to remain forever lost. With a little detective work, you can restore the past to memory and recover your life story.  In the process, you will create a memoir that will let you more fully appreciate the richness of your experience and your own personal journey.  Here are a few tips to get you started.

First, make yourself a time line.  Put on it each year of life, and fill in the basics—home addresses, names of schools and employers, the dates of anniversaries, births, and other important moments.  If you can, fill in the names of friends, teachers, and neighbors.  Put down the make and model of your family's cars and the ones you've owned as an adult.  Don't overlook past pets and hobbies you've enjoyed.  (Do you know any stamp collectors today?)  Try to recall at least one event for each year.  Let each memory lead you to others.  You are creating your own biography.  How far back in time can you go?

List some personal questions you can ask yourself about each stage of your life.  What clothes did you wear?  What foods did you enjoy?  How about your favorite books, cartoons, music, movies, and television shows?  An elderly judge of my acquaintance used to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies on his television set each night—not because he loved the movies, wonderful as they were, but because they let him remember how it felt to see them as a young man.

In your quest for personal history, don't overlook these key sources:

• household artifacts that survive from past generations, such as your mother's mixer, your grandmother's recipe for snickerdoodles, the family Bible, furniture, dishes and flatware, and jewelry.
• snapshots that show you the settings of your life.  Remember that wallpaper and the dining room chairs on which your father rocked back every night at dinner?  Or the baize glass door letting onto the back porch, through which you could see your mother coming to rescue you with Band-Aids?  What rituals, games, and family pastimes have disappeared in the mists of time?  How about gadgets and gizmos—record players, typewriters, table radios, pencil boxes, and toys?
• older friends and family members who knew you when, whose memories can usefully supplement your own.  When you speak with old people, notice their language.  Do they use phrases or expressions that would be unfamiliar to today's teenagers?  Conversations about past times shared can be a wonderful way to celebrate relationships.  If you go online, using Facebook or Classmates.com, for example, you  may be able to reconnect with people you haven't seen in years.
• newspapers and magazines from different periods.  Do you remember when (and how) the country marked the centennial of the Civil War?  When you add major historical events to your time line, can you recall how you felt about them as they were happening?  Where were you during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

You may also want to return to different places to spark more memories.  How does your childhood home look to the older you?  How has the neighborhood changed?  If you walk through the doors of your elementary school, does the smell of floor wax remind you of anything? You might also enjoy visiting antique shops, which appeal to many people precisely because the sight of long-forgotten but familiar objects triggers precious memories.

All of us constantly reinvent ourselves from birth to the grave.  In the process we are creating a narrative that has a coherent beginning, a middle, and an end, makes sense of the life we have lived, and celebrates us as storytellers for future generations.  In this way we fashion our identities as eyewitnesses of our times and also remind ourselves of who we are and of the values we stand for.
 

Comments

[Catatonic Kid]

Great ideas! =)

Really, it will, fingers crossed, prove useful in my current quest to encourage the older members of my family to write something, anything about their personal history and their sense of identity so that we have something for future generations.

These folks have such rich histories. I think now maybe this more personal motivation could prove tempting, or at least get them thinking in the right direction.