Family Stories: A Holiday Tradition

Stories I wish I knew about my family

Were any of my Irish relatives trapped in steerage as the Titanic sank?

Was one side of my mother’s family really related to the Lloyd’s of London?

How did my parents—my Catholic father and Lutheran mother—convince their parents that it was OK for them to marry. Especially in 1934, when marrying outside of one’s faith was not only rare, but often marginally accepted.

How did my upper middle-class maternal grandparents get on with my working class paternal ones?

What about my aunts and uncles and their stories? My parents moved from Philadelphia to Chicago before I was born, so I grew up seeing those relatives only once a year, twice if there was some special occasion.

And what about all those great-uncles on my father’s maternal side—the Sullivan boys? I knew only one of them—Vincent. He’d remained a grieving bachelor his entire life—his fiancé dying young of TB—and ended up living with my widowed grandmother until she died.

At her funeral, my father invited Uncle Vince—now somewhere in his 70’s—to come live with us in Hillside, Illinois. Now I was only 14 or 15 at the time, and he seemed to me more stranger than kin, someone I didn’t warm to, let alone want to know much about.

Of course, now that I myself am his age, I so wish I knew his stories. Because he was my kin, my father’s uncle, my grandmother’s brother. What could I have learned from him? Not only about my grands and greats, but about the times he grew up in? And the places?

Somewhere in Uncle Vince’s story I believe there is a part of my own. And around the holidays, I find myself especially missing his.

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If you have stories you’d like to pass along to your family, consider coming to my workshop Writing Family Stories: The Holiday Version. It takes place at the Rogers Park Library, 6907 N. Clark St., on Monday, December 18, 2-4 pm.

Here's the link to the Library's website, including a description of the workshop and how to register. There is no charge for attending.

https://chipublib.bibliocommons.com/events/search/fq=branch_location_id:(61)/event/5a1f2dfea7da1e2f00e154fa

Any questions about the workshop, please feel free to email me directly at madmoon55@hotmail.com.

Friends With Benefits: The SuperAger Version

Well, I’m not yet a SuperAger—though I hope to be—but this latest aging study confirms what we might kinda, sorta already know: strong social ties are good for us, can even make us healthier.

As reporter Kate Thayer writes in “Being social and sharp,” (Chicago Tribune, 9 November 2017):

“Such strong friendships [as those of 103 year-old Edith Smith] may contribute to higher cognitive functioning and sharper memory in adults as they age, according to a new study by researchers at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. The latest findings are part of Northwestern’s study of so-called SuperAgers — adults 80 or older with the cognitive abilities of those in their 50s or 60s.”

Now I’ve not studied the science that looks at the social, even tribal, relationships among human beings, but I’d guess they have, from the git-go, allowed us to survive, especially in hostile environments.

And not only physically.

There are surely emotional and psychological reasons for bonding with others, joining forces with them, creating group names and secret handshakes. And it turns out, spoiler alert, that the need for these bonds never goes away: more than simply persisting, our social ties may allow us to persist.

I marked several passages in Thayer’s article, but was heartened to learn from Emily Rogalski, senior author of the Northwestern study that it was “the first to go beyond biological factors of SuperAgers.”

Yes, we are more than our biology, our physical selves, something SuperAgers have likely learned along their long journey.

To read more, and especially to make the acquaintance of Edith Smith, champion SuperAger, click here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-met-friendships-help-memory-study-20171106-story.html

RIP: Miss Pirman

I didn’t even want to go to Nazareth Academy, at the time an all-girls Catholic high school in LaGrange. My older brother had gone to Immaculate Conception in Elmhurst, still Catholic, but co-ed. Why couldn’t I go there?

My Catholic father wouldn’t budge, believing that the nuns and lay teachers at Nazareth would be stricter, keep me more in line, and so less likely to get into the kind of trouble my brother did regularly at IC.

Well, yes and no. I mean, if one is prone to that kind of thing, the setting doesn’t really matter. Which is why when I get together with my fellow Naz grads—those eight “girls” who still live in the area—we have many funny stories to share of how we daily tested those nuns and teachers.

But I must add that in addition to our shenanigans, we were also fairly decent students, the lessons pouring in spite of ourselves.

For me, some of the most important lessons came from my high school English teacher, Miss Pirman. In fact, it’s probably not an understatement to say that had it not been for her, I would never have become a writer, and never 51 years after being her student, become an author.

It was my pleasure to show my gratitude to Miss Pirman in my book, Finding Your Voice, Telling Your Stories. In Chapter 3, “Telling Stories About People,” I describe her generosity and her influence, something I wish I could’ve done in person, long before she died last Tuesday at age 81, just one day after my 74^th birthday.

Miss Pirman is not the first of my high school teachers to die, but her death resonates more than the others. The following excerpt from my book—“People from High School”—might help explain why:

People from High School

High school is a critical time for most of us, so it is no wonder that many of our important, even dramatic, stories originate there: stories of classmates, best friends, and hated enemies; of dances, sports events, and talent shows; coming-of-age stories about first loves, finding our place among peers, finding even our life’s work.  For some there are dark stories as well, of troubles at home or at school.  And of course there are stories about the adults from that time: those teachers, coaches, and counselors who inspired us, saved us, or whom we barely survived.

            In my writing workshops, I regularly invoke the spirit of my freshman English teacher, Miss Pirman.  I’d arrived in her class ill prepared in the basics of English grammar and so she’d volunteered to tutor me on her own time after school, to help me catch up with the others.  I can still see us sitting there in that empty classroom, the thin autumn light coming through the windows, me hunched over at my desk, her next to me, that quiet, encouraging voice leading me through the monotonous grammar drills. 

            It was in that tedious process that Miss Pirman unwittingly instilled in me an enduring love of words, which she then recognized by publishing my first poem in our class anthology.  It was a bouncy little paen to a St. Bernard dog that I can recite to this day.

And if there is a heaven--the "Paradise" that Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, imagined "will be a kind of library”--then I imagine I’ll be seeing Miss Pirman again.

From Ancient Greece to the Present: The Healing Power of Stories

A friend told me last night about an article in the Smithsonian he’d just read: “The Healing Power of Greek Tragedy. Do plays written centuries ago have the power to heal modern day traumas? A new project raises the curtain on a daring new experiment.”

Charles knew I’d be interested in the piece for several reasons. First, I help people write their personal stories, including as a way to better understand the darker moments they’ve lived through.

Also, I’m a writer, currently working on an Op-Ed piece I’m hoping to see published on or before Veterans Day. Inspired by what I experienced during the Vietnam War years, it is a longer, and more detailed version, of my brief story that appeared recently on PBS.org, as part of the Ken Burns’s “The Vietnam War” film website:

“I was 23 when the two men I loved most in my life served in Vietnam. Philip was stationed in Cam Ranh Bay and returned home in 1967. I married him in October, and in August 1968 we stood with thousands protesting the war in Chicago’s Grant Park during the Democratic National Convention. Eddie was killed in Vietnam in 1969, just as Philip’s drug use was escalating and he and I separated. Best friends, Eddie and Philip were both casualties of that war.”

The timing of my Op-Ed piece and of the Vietnam War documentary series and of Veterans Day makes the Smithsonian article especially relevant to me. I want to pass along the link should some of my readers find it relevant as well.

And note: While the article focuses mainly on The Theater of War—the creation of director and co-founder Bryan Doerries—the piece also mentions other traumatic situations, including Ferguson, to which Dowries applies the ancient Greek tragedies:

“Theater of War Productions has presented more than 650 performances for military and civilian audiences all over the world, from Guantánamo to Walter Reed, from Japan to Alaska to Germany. Doerries has employed other plays from ancient Greece to serve other purposes as well, addressing issues such as domestic violence, drug and alcohol addiction, gun violence and prison violence. Presentations can be tailored for service members, veterans, prison guards, nurses, first responders, doctors and police officers.”

Finally, here’s Doerries himself, on what he sees as the connection between the Greek tragedies, i.e., stories, and trauma:

“Through tragedy, the great Athenian poets were not articulating a pessimistic or fatalistic view of human experience; nor were they bent on filling audiences with despair. Instead, they were giving voice to timeless human experiences—of suffering and grief—that, when viewed by a large audience that had shared those experiences, fostered compassion, understanding and a deeply felt interconnection. Through tragedy, the Greeks faced the darkness of human existence as a community [emphasis mine].”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/healing-power-greek-tragedy-180965220/