WRITING LIFE'S EXPERIENCES

I don't suggest everyone  follow my lead and write their life's experiences, but when you think of the history that will be unknown by many of your family members  generations to come, I wonder if you wouldn't get the fire started underneath you.

I'm teaching the second part of a two-part series of "Mining Your Memories --Writing Life's Experinces." It is a free course held once a month for four months and is divided into two parts: birth through elementary school and middle/junior high to young adulthood.

Because I am a self-starter, I have been writing various stories of happenings in my life thoughout the last 15 years. I realized early that some people need to be pushed. They need reason and a prod of their memory banks. I always thought of my brain as being like the post office boxes from the rear: series of slots where adventures, experences, important dates and such were slips of paper lying inside the slots. When the slots got full that part of the brain shut down until another slot opened up. In class I direct the adults to think by giving them situations or key words that put themselves into a time frame when they can remember a place and activity.

So with the support of a local library I set up free classes and have had good results.

For example, when we entered seventh grade, we signed Valentine cards with trite sayings we haven't used since that time: "Be mine to the end of time,""You are my sunshine." We began with everyone writing their own obituaries. Yes, I emphasized  a good obituary is self-written and should be an historic account of themselves. In elementary school we drew a houseplan where we lived at that time. That alone prompted many stories from the class. One student called his "My House of Memories".

There are lots of books one can follow, but sometimes sitting and reading the hundreds of questions printed one after the other becomes daunting. We discuss the time period, putting ourselves into elementary. junior high and high schools by describing what the buildings looked, where one's classes were located, who the teachers were, favorite classes, etc. We remember polio shots, favorite music, how we dressed, the way guys wore their hair, and the like. Remembering is the best way to appreciate the past.

We are in a small way contributing to the mass history of the 1930s through the 1970s. You may not ever read these accounts, but hundreds of family members will.

I felt comfortable about starting this class and sure enough in the middle of an hour someone will speak up and say, "I can't believe I can remember this." I hand out personal essays of friends who've captured that time and period, thus giving the class an opening that allows them to remember.

This is fun for me and for them. At the same time at home I'm typing as fast as possible to write the same assignment. From the accounts we write we'll find nuggets of stories we can expand on and create funny incidents to captivate their grandchildren, neices, and nephews. Learning to tell the story is just as important as writing them.

Eventually a small group will continue to write and our goal is to see that everyone prints up his own life's stories in a manner they can distribute and leave as a legacy.

High School Yearbooks

You'll do it as I'm doing  now. Reviewing yearbooks. Remembering stories and people's faces. Recalling what was important  in high school. As I search for ideas to write, I'm drawn to several incidents that occurred during my high school days. So I reach up to the topmost shelf and wiggle my fingers until they touch THE BOOK. This one relates  my single year, the tenth grade, that I attended Central High School. I had earlier spent three years in junior high with many of the sophomores pictured in the Cotton Boll. For that reason I keep the book handy.
The photos are available when I'm helping someone research family members, when the annual is the only source for remembering a particular person, as cameras in the late 1940's early 1950's weren't like cell phones of today.

I've turned to a page to remember an old boyfriend; a friend  who recently passed away; a neighbor I"m sure I know but can't place; or a teacher I want to point out to R with a fond experience to tell. Yearbooks are the portals to revisiting our youth.

Recently, while researching on Ancestry.com, I came upon a notice that annuals are being collected and torn page by page to microfilm to add to their vast research resources . I have been trying to tear the Cotton Bowl away from my knarly grasp, like pulling a child from its  mother's arms. I'm fearful that if I send it off to the netherlands I'll find thousands of reasons for having kept it. That is something I'll have to work on.

Fifty Years Ago. . .

...I was a young teacher with four classes of tenth grade English and one class of Spanish in the original building housing Central High School in Jackson, MS. The half century class reunion of 1959 held its gathering last evening in Jackson at a site that was a wooded area fifty years ago. Those posing for a photo showed that despite the number of deceased, there were a large number still living. They are now retired or nearly so, have contributed much to their community, and only twelve years younger than I.

Today I wish I had begun my teaching at Central. I had chosen to "learn the ropes" in two small Delta towns before tackling a large school in the capitol city. Blessed is what I call my years at Central, a school being torn apart by progress--new high schools in the northern and western ends of town. Soon Central High would be an empty building with its wide hallways, creaking wood stairs, stalwart lockers lining the walls like sentinels, dark basement rooms, empty patios. Silent but for the echoes of the once-heard marching of ROTC students outside and the commands of their drill instructors, locker doors slamming between classes, and the thousands of feet pounding the wood floors only to quieten when the bells clanged to warn of classes beginning or ending. With little trouble I can transform myself mentally into those hallways just left or right of the auditorium. As I progress through the hallways,I hear teachers explaining the history lesson, the math problem, the rules of grammar. No school was like Central High, and I was in a bit of heaven last night as I saw and talked with many of my former students, my mind reeling with photos of them as seventeen-year olds.




There were five of us teachers out of ten who attended. At our table we talked about the meaning of this school and declared that our time at Central High was the best of any school where we had worked. We were family. What better way to explain the warmth we still hold in our hearts for these students and faculty with whom we worked?