Wednesday August 25, 2004
Memories lost forever
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Pat Richards, Spud Lodge, Gilbert Arnold, Frank Hall – all of them, at one time, members of the board of directors of our local museum. All of them now also dead.
It may be only my imagination, but it seems that the old timers, the people who remember the origins of our community, are dropping faster than flies.
With each one vanishes a lifetime of accumulated information.
When I first moved here and joined the local museum board, ten years ago, I sometimes got frustrated during meetings. Whatever the subject, it seemed to bring up a series of reminiscences about who said what to whom, when. I thought members should stick to the agenda.
Now I realize those reminiscences were the agenda.
Because the job of a museum is to preserve information. Sometimes that information is a physical object that belonged to a pioneer – a pair of shoes, a desk, a saddle, an axe… More often, though, the information is a story.
Recently, the museum has been building up its archives collection. That includes the interwoven genealogies of pioneer families. Newspaper clippings. Diaries. Letters.
But these can never be more than a small fraction of the information stored in human memory. That was what the board members brought forth, triggered spontaneously by some current event.
And once they\’re gone, those memories are gone forever, like gasoline evaporating without a trace.
Information addiction
\”Times New Roman\”> I may be biased about this, of course, because I\’m an information junkie. Most people value information for its practical application. I value information for itself. I suck up trivia the way a vacuum cleaner sucks up dust – anything from the relationship between right- and left-handed quarks in quantum physics to how the formula for ocean waves illuminates highway traffic tie-ups.
The individual memories themselves may not be significant. But the loss of them is irretrievable.
A formal memoir is a poor substitute. Former U.S. President Bill Clinton didn\’t write what we wanted to know about; he wrote what he wanted us to know about. Memoirs are almost always an exercise in self-justification – a reorganizing of the disparate fragments of life to make ourselves look and feel a little better.
Local pioneer Northcote Caesar wrote some of his memoirs in verse. The discipline of rhyming couplets inevitably influenced his choice of diction, his details, his descriptions. It\’s not the same thing as having him around.
Preserving memories
\”Times New Roman\”> A museum tries to preserve a few of those memories. In photographs, in books, in documents, in artefacts… It is never fully successful.
It\’s better than nothing, mind you. There are few things more pathetic than a community that lacks any sense of its own roots. Like individuals unsure of their own identity, they drift in every fad and fashion like tumbleweeds blowing in the wind.
In that sense, a museum is the heart and soul of a community.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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