Everybody has a story.
Often when doing interviews for newspaper articles, people will
tell me,
”
You don’t want to hear about my life. It’s so boring.
”
But invariably I find after they get comfortable with the
interview process and open up, they share with me the most
delightful stories about themselves.
Everybody has a story.
Often when doing interviews for newspaper articles, people will tell me, “You don’t want to hear about my life. It’s so boring.” But invariably I find after they get comfortable with the interview process and open up, they share with me the most delightful stories about themselves.
Recently, Cheryl Huguenor, the program director of Gilroy’s Live Oak Adult Day Services, invited me to spend a morning with the center’s senior citizens clients. I chatted with them about what personal stories they remembered of their yesteryears.
I’ll describe a few of their recollections. (For their privacy and safety, Huguenor asked me not to reveal the client’s last names.)
One delightful woman named Jennie told me that in 1947 when she was 17, her parents arranged her marriage to a 32-year-old man named Al. Her parents had told her, “We’re going to find a good husband that will take care of you.”
As a teenager, Jennie felt scared about taking this big leap into matrimony with someone she didn’t know very well. But in describing the match, she told me, “It turned out good. It was full of love.”
She and Al had a dozen children and a happy life together.
John, another Live Oak client, told me about growing up near the San Joaquin Valley town of Lodi. As a kid, he spent long hours pasting labels on the wood boxes holding fruit picked on the family farm.
“I still have a label,” he said proudly. “It’s a blue pigeon label.”
So many pigeons nested in the barn that John’s father decided to use the bird as a symbol for the farm’s fruit, he said.
California’s Central Valley gets blistering hot in the summer months. So in the days before air conditioning became popular, farm houses such as the one John grew up in were built with basements.
“We’d often go underground into these basements where it was a lot cooler,” he said.
A charming woman named Eunice remembers as a child traveling from Oregon to California where her family planned to make their home. Oregon has no sales tax, and so, when Eunice’s mother went into a California store for supplies, she was shocked when the clerk added the extra tax money to the total.
“Of course, she got really mad at the clerk,” Eunice recalls with a laugh. Her mother soon enough learned to calculate the California tax to all her purchases.
Eunice also recalls the day her Gilroy apartment building burned down. Arson inspectors later determined that the landlord had intentionally set the blaze.
“I got out just in time,” she said.
Another client named Jim remembered the days when the sport of waterskiing was the passion of his life. He became a United States waterskiing champion and won more than 30 trophies.
But beyond the glory of the sport, he especially remembered the sunny days when he and his family would spend time together on the Delta enjoying their water sport.
Mary told me about her youthful years growing up on a dairy farm just outside of Gilroy. As a youngster, she’d work hard doing her daily chores. But she also found opportunities to play.
One of her happiest memories was playing hide and seek and other childhood games in the barn.
Listening to these people and their tales of their past reminded me of a child’s book one of my grade-school teachers read to the class. It stressed the importance of listening to the stories of our elders.
During a famine, a man decided his aged father was a useless drain on the family’s resources. One morning he put the old man in a horse-drawn cart and drove into the wilderness to leave his dad to the wild animals.
That afternoon, the man’s little son found out what happened. The boy went out into the wild and brought his grandfather back home. The boy begged his father to let the grandfather to live and remain with them. Finally the man agreed.
The famine grew worse. The desperate man didn’t know what to do to keep his family and the other villagers from starving.
But one evening, he happened to overhear the old man telling the boy a story about another period of famine the village experienced many years ago.
At that time, a wise old man had told the people to take down their thatched roofs and shake all the grain seeds out of the stalks and to plant these.
The rains came, the seeds grew, and the village was saved. From his father’s story, the man realized how to save his own village.
The elderly man proved useful after all.
The senior citizens of the Live Oak Adult Day Services also shared much of their wisdom from their life experiences.
Jennie’s stories show that despite a person’s initial fears, a marriage can turn out well if it’s filled with love.
John’s stories teach about the pride of working hard on a farm – as well as how to stay cool in the summer. Eunice’s stories show the importance of finding out about a state’s tax laws before you buy something. Another of her pearls of wisdom is to always have a plan for escaping a fire in your home.
Jim’s stories teach about the importance of enjoying time with your family in outdoor activities.
And Mary’s farm stories teach the importance of always finding time to have fun after your day’s work.
Everyone has a story to share. We just need to take the time to simply stop a while and listen.
