Recently, the family and I took a short trip to see my mom, who still lives in the hometown where I grew up. My mom and I got to talking one night about some of the stories I’m brainstorming right now, and she mentioned that she’d love to see a story about my great-grandfather, who, as a child, lived in a railroad car. This fascinated me, of course. He was a railroad man through and through, and, after spending some time in a war, he came back to help lay the railroads in Texas.
My mom kept a whole bunch of documents and old photos that show my great-grandfather and his brothers standing in front of the railroad car where he lived. She dug out some papers with facts like how long they lived there and what the railroad car was called and all their family members who came to visit them.
From this document, I learned that my great-grandfather had an uncle who was a newspaper man. He came to visit my great-grandfather’s family in the railroad car, which seemed to be significant because, on this visit, my great-great uncle would not get out of bed, claiming he had a crazy wife and didn’t want to go back home to all the madness in his life.
Now. All this was fascinating, and I’m currently doing research on railway cars and railroad tracks in Texas. But what was even more significant was the story that all this told about my family. Here was proof of our bend toward the melodramatic. We could trace the origins of it to my great-great uncle.
But the story also showed me my writing roots. I have a degree in journalism. It’s where I started my writing career. And to know that I had an great-great uncle who made a living as a journalist is further proof that I am exactly who I was made to be—and it proves where I’m going.
The past is often hard and painful for us to sift back through. I’m in the middle of writing a memoir that has, so far, taken seven months to write, because the past is much harder to write about than the fictional stories of people, at least for me. Some people think we should just let the past lie. But I believe that our past can show us not only who we’re meant to be, but where we’re going in our future.
That’s what all those old documents showed me as I sifted through them at my mom’s house. I had never met the people mentioned in some of the stories. They died before I was even born—some of them from really bizarre things, like the aunt who died from a squirrel bite. But they left me something—a path forward. They made it through their hard times and became better for them. That means I can, too.
What we can all learn from this is that our pasts have something to teach us, if we’re willing to mine them.
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I hope you’ve enjoyed this inside look at my life and family. Every Friday, I publish a short blog on something personal that includes a valuable takeaway. For more of my essays and memoir writings, visit Wing Chair Musings.
