These Stories Will Change Your Life

Dad is laughing so hard that everyone else in the room—all 32 nieces, nephews, cousins and long-time friends—is laughing too. This strikes me as strange since no one knows what he’s laughing about; he hasn’t yet reached the punch line.

He’s in the midst of reading aloud a story about his father—something about how my grandfather was in his grocery store, back in the early '30s, when a man came in “with the name of Bu or Lu, or some two-letter word.”

My dad pauses, gasps for air and continues reading through his laughter:

"That’s a short name," said Dad.

"Bet mine’s shorter," said a guy standing nearby.

"Not possible," said Dad.

"Wanna bet?" said the man.

"Sure," said Dad.

“Well," says my own father, looking up from his book, "you got it. The man’s name was Shorter!”

And his face is red with the hilarity of it.

My dad’s 89, and he doesn’t laugh as much as he used to. Ailing joints, failing kidneys—it’s not all that much fun getting old, he tells me. But today he’s not worrying about the future. He’s reminiscing about the past. And he’s loving every minute of it.

This party, a get-together where he and Mom sign copies of their privately printed memoir, is the culmination of a two-year project. As a long-time journalist, I’d interviewed thousands of other people’s parents; finally I’d decided it was time to interview my own. Someday, I figured, my children would want to know about their grandparents’ lives. As for me, why, I thought I already knew the family history.

But I didn’t. Oh, I knew the Biblical begets and begats. My aunt had compiled a family tree, and I could trace my roots back eight generations, to some place called White Russia.

I even knew a lot of the major events—how Dad’s Norman Rockwell childhood was upended when his father got sick, how Mom’s parents came from Russia just one step ahead of the pogroms. But I didn’t know the little stuff—how it changed them and what they learned from it.

Their stories were ordinary stories. I learned how my uncle made a radio from a Quaker Oats cereal box, and how Dad made a scooter out of an old roller skate, a piece of scrap wood and a discarded orange crate. “We reused things,” Dad said. “not because we had to, but because you just didn’t throw things out.”

Suddenly I understood why I can’t throw out a piece of paper till I’ve used both sides. It’s all because my dad made scooters out of skates.

Yes, some of the reminiscing was hard for my parents. Dad’s voice caught when he told about a cousin’s drowning, and Mom got tears in her eyes she talked about a sister’s cancer. They were somber as they spoke of their business ups and downs, and I was awed (and humbled) by how much they’d sacrificed to send me to college. I’d had no idea.

But it was the younger members of the family who were most impressed with the stories. Studies at Emory University show that children have more self-confidence and fewer emotional problems when they know their family history, especially when they know about the struggles as well as the successes. This, say the researchers, shows the kids that they come from hardy stock; it gives them strength to deal with their own problems.

One of my cousins, a 9-year-old, came up to me after Mom had read one of her stories about her father, his great-grandfather. “That was a pretty good story,” he said. “It makes me proud to be me.”

Each of my parents reacted differently to the process of reminiscence. Dad liked the idea of passing on his wisdom. After all, he’s been telling us what to do for most of his life; he sees no reason to be silenced by a silly thing called death. (Now that he’s seen last year’s Harris poll showing that adult children consider a family’s stories to be even more important than its wealth, he’s even happier. He has, he says, more stories than sterling.)

For Mom, it was a chance to be young again. As she told of flying in a single engine open-cockpit plane with one of the handsomest guys in her high school, her face softened and her voice became flirtatious. She was, once again, 17.

Maybe there isn’t a fountain of youth. But if, in retelling old stories, we can go back to a time when we had more of a future than a past, then the experience has to be good for you.

Meanwhile, my dad’s still laughing. He’s reading another tale, this one about the time his old convertible almost sank in Lake Michigan. “He thinks it’s funnier now than he did then,” my mom whispers.

But she’s grinning, too. I think how lucky I am that my parents were willing to share their stories. It’s good for all of us.

Gross lives in Denver, where, as a professional personal historian, she helps people write their own family stories.