Many voices, one story

Not long ago, a friend recounted an event that happened while he was in law school. One morning during class, a professor left his laptop in its case by the open door to the classroom. Suddenly in the middle of class, someone darted from the hall through the doorway, grabbed the laptop, and ran off.

The professor asked each student to write down what had just transpired, and the students realized soon enough that what had looked like a random happening was actually staged by the professor to introduce a lesson on eyewitness reports – a lesson whose significance became obvious once the students discovered how many different narratives existed within that one class where they all witnessed the same event.

I thought about this story over the weekend as I interviewed more than a dozen members of one extended family for a memoir project. The subject of the memoir is a grandfather in his eighties; each child and each grandchild, most of whom are now adults themselves, was asked to tell me stories and anecdotes about their grandfather. The interviews were private, so no family member knew what any other one had said.

Accuracy of eyewitness accounts is important to attorneys, of course. In the case of my friend’s law class, the point was how unreliable and how widely varying a description of a happening can be. Journalists take a different approach to this: rather than exploring the varying viewpoints, they tend to keep interviewing witnesses until a consistent picture begins to emerge.

But I was following the model of neither attorney nor journalist when I did these interviews over the weekend. I welcomed differences in perspective. Many of the children’s and the grandchildren’s stories overlapped or coincided, but each time I heard the same event described, the details were different. One child remembered the grandfather taking them out for ice cream after a long day’s work; another recounted that the highlight of that excursion was a ride at a go-cart track. One sibling, describing the walk to a neighborhood candy store fifty years ago, said it was a long walk up a big hill; a younger sibling remembered it as an easy little foray, though he later admitted that as the youngest, he was usually pushed in a stroller and might not have appreciated just how steep the hill actually was.

In law or reporting, these kinds of variations are wrinkles that require ironing out, but in memoir writing, they add texture and intrigue. This was the first time I’d taken a multi-generational approach to writing a memoir; normally I focus on just one person, but this family came up with the idea of having all of them contribute their own anecdotes and recollections, and as my weekend of interviewing progressed, I realized what a great idea it actually was.

On the one hand, it generated a lot of stories. With more than a dozen different individuals recalling the same person, many different memories were excavated and many tales told. But just as much fun was hearing one or two of the same favorite stories, told over and over again, in different voices and with different interpretations. 

Accuracy matters in some fields, but in memoir writing, perspective is more important. The multi-faceted perspectives offered by one large family reflecting on their grandfather – his life, his personality, the lessons he imparted – made his story much richer than a single narrative ever could have done.

The one (story) that got away

My kids love to hear their grandfather’s tales about when he was a camp counselor: over dinner they ask for story after story. When their cousins are present, sometimes the older kids are able to chime in with details they remember from when they heard my father’s stories for the first time.

But recently I found myself thinking about the stories that do not get passed down: not necessarily serious or tragic ones, or family secrets, but anecdotes no one ever bothered to retell.

This was on my mind because I was making a salad to bring to a party and decided at the last minute not to bring the set of salad servers that matched the bowl in which I was preparing the greens. That particular situation may sound like it has little to do with family stories, but in fact this particular salad set has everything to do with story-telling, or the lack thereof.

When I was growing up, my mother had a Lucite-type salad bowl, clear durable plastic, in which was embedded what appeared to be real preserved butterflies. It was a pretty serving bowl with lots of colors, so when my sister was cleaning out my grandmother’s kitchen inventory after my grandmother’s death and asked if I would like a similar bowl, I said I certainly would, happy as always to have kitchenware that reminded me of the pieces I grew up using.

Just a couple of weeks after the bowl and its matching servers arrived, I made a large salad for a dinner party. “So about these salad servers…” one guest said midway through dinner, and some of the other guests started to laugh. I assumed I’d missed an inside joke while I was in the kitchen and didn’t give it another thought until the next get-together to which I brought a salad. At that gathering, someone was more direct, asking outright, “Why does your salad set have a pattern of marijuana leaves?”

Honestly, I had no clue. It turned out that the new salad set was similar in materials and style to the butterfly one, except had I bothered to look a little closer, I would have noticed that where the other bowl had pressed butterflies, mine had what appeared to be pressed marijuana leaves. The pattern appeared in the serving pieces as well as the bowl.

I’ve had this salad set for about eight years now. More often than not, when I use it, someone asks about the unusual inlay. And the fact is, I don’t know the answer. I asked my mother, but she had no idea why her parents possessed such a peculiar kitchen item. She too had always assumed the decorative items under the clear Lucite were butterflies or dried flowers, and admitted that even if she’d looked more closely, she wouldn’t have recognized the five-point leaves for what they were. But apparently that puts her in the minority of people I know, because everyone else seems to zoom in on the pattern with laser focus.

So this is a case where a family story was not retold, and details were lost in time that can probably never be recaptured. Whatever the story behind this salad bowl is, my mother and her sisters do not know, and my grandparents are long gone, so we will probably never know.

I’d like to have some interesting tale to tell, but I haven’t even managed to make one up so far. I have no idea what lies behind my peculiar salad servers, and frankly, sometimes I get tired of being asked, which is why on the recent day that I was making a salad, I’d actually decided not to use that salad set simply to avoid the familiar old conversation.

It’s not really surprising that my grandparents neglected to jot down the story of the pot-leaf salad bowl and file it away with their legal documents, but I regret the fact that it’s a story I’ve never heard. All the narratives and details that family members share with one another as the years go by, whether it’s about being a camp counselor or where the key to the safety deposit box is hidden, matter on some level. Most of them matter more than the origins of my salad bowl. But I’m still sorry that this story is the one that got away.