Becoming More

 More of what, I ask myself?  Over the past month I've scoured the internet, magazines, even my own library of books for an answer to what compels me to write, to participate in the Slice of Life challenge.  The only answer that makes sense to me is that I have a lifetime of stories to tell.  Some of the stories are bizarre.  Most of my stories are just humdrum recollections of my life.  Humdrum is what matters, ultimately, because it is the little stories of our lives that define who we are, day to day.

Humdrum is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as something that is monotonous or boring.  

Very recently, I came upon one of my father's personal journals.  He wasn't much of a writer.  In fact, in life, he wasn't a writer at all.  And yet, here I was looking through his personal journal from 1953.  Looking at the binding of this leather-bound journal, you might think it was nearly brand new.  Only the gold lettering on the front gives away its true age.  The lettering stares back at my, declaring the journal's true age.

1953

In 1953, my father was fourteen, going on fifteen.  I know from the dates in his journal that much of what he wrote about that year transpired months before his fifteenth birthday, which is November 4th.  The earlier part of that year was a wet one in Northern California.  My father wrote endlessly about the rain, his walks in the rain, and his staring out the window at the rain, but his journal also revealed other things about his life with the family as it existed at that time.

He revealed in one journal entry that the sun broke one day in the middle of a rainy week.  For that single entry, he wrote about going to town with his mother and sisters.  He wrote of shopping for school supplies and groceries with them, and even about going to the movie theater in Garberville.  As I read this entry, I wondered what movie he watched with his siblings that day.  Apparently, his mother, my grandmother Hortense, picked them up from the theater, which implied that she had some errands that required her to leave them at the theater while she attended to some business.

This also made me think about the sawmill, the restaurant, and the bar the family owned in those days.  How did my grandmother manage to work with my grandfather, Tony, and raise three children at the same time?  If I had to guess, there was certainly one way she dealt with her enormous responsibilities when she had her children in tow.  They were old enough to leave at the movie theater for a matinee performance while she went about her business for the day.

I recall seeing a photograph of the cars they owned in those days, two enormous Cadillac de Ville coup's.  I am imagining my grandmother, driving about town attending to her business errands.  I can see my father and his sisters seated side by side in the movie theater, probably watching a western.  And then I can see them again, seated in the back of the cavernous de Ville, piled high with the trappings of grandmother Hortense' errands.

What I appreciate the most about this recollection is that it made me think about what my grandmother was doing that day, the day my father talked about going into town on a rare sunny day.  The day my father mentioned, almost in passing, that his mother picked them up from the movie theater.  I am reminded of just how busy she was with taking care of her children and attending to the family businesses.  

Sunny days in California during the winter are no rarity.  I am grateful for the rain that year, twenty years before my birth, because it inspired my father to write a bit about his life in 1953.  

In this moment I have turned to one of my bookcases and I can see the gold lettering of dad's personal journal peeking out to me from amongst the other books.  Becoming more, I think, occurs as an outgrowth of writing about the little things.  The little things in life that we remember are significant for how they can spark other thoughts, other recollections.  

I will return to 1953 in the future, but I will do it with an eye to the gold lettering on the spine of my father's personal journal of that year.  It shall serve as one of the many significant little things that inspire me to sit. To ponder. To remember.