Wednesday 12 February 2014

Guest Post By My Mum: A Good Advice

or: How a Walk Can Lead To a Guest Post.

Last Friday, I had the day off. My original plan was to go for a nice long walk, something I'd not done in a while and was really looking forward to, especially when Thursday was a beautiful sunny day. Friday morning, though, was grey and wet. I resigned myself into simply enjoying a lazy day at home, but in the early afternoon, it cleared up a little and looked as if, although still grey, it would not be raining again in the next few hours. So I rang my Mum and we arranged to go for a walk together.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, maybe you'll know that I have a thing not only about doors and doorways, but also about wide open spaces. Every now and then, some of my most highly esteemed fellow bloggers provide me with wonderful pictures of such spaces (you know who you are!), something I am always happy to look at.

When we reached the fields, there was hardly anybody about, it being a Friday afternoon and not yet quite the weekend. Our area has a lot of industry and certainly not the best air quality, and the landscape is really as featureless as it looks in these pictures, but it is our home country, and we are quite attached to it.





The pictures give you a pretty good idea of how vast it is just a few hundred yards from town, and what kind of weather it was. As you can see, the sun was trying hard! There was even a narrow strip of blue sky showing! That blue strip widened quite nicely later on, but I did not take any more pictures by then.

At some stage, my Mum said she wanted to tell me something that I might find strange. But let her say it in her own words, in the shape of a guest post (her first since last July):

A Good Advice

The older I become, the more I look back at my past, my childhood, my youth, and the more I regret that there is no-one left of the generation before me. The reason is: I cannot ask about  things and events anymore, which happened long ago, or about facts from our town, for example, which former building or square was on a certain corner.

And I also regret very much that I didn't always listen properly when my mother told me old stories, because now it is too late, I can't ask her anymore. Though my memory reaches far, nearly until when I was three, there are some experiences rather vaguely in my mind ore quite lost. And sometimes when I am thinking about a specific matter,  I would be very glad to have one of my parents or relations to help me further.

My brother is only five years older than me, and he remembers some things better, but he is the same generation as well.

So I said to my daughters, ask all the questions you may have now, while our minds are still clear, before it will also be too late.

Perhaps that sounds a bit sentimental, but as I talked about this topic with friends my age, most of them told me that they have quite the same feelings. So I give all the young people my good advice: use the chance to learn about the past, otherwise it will be lost for all times.

- - - End of guest post - - -

Maybe you are not too surprised to hear that I never tire of hearing the "old stories". I may not always show as much patience as I should, patience never having been one of my strengths, but that does not mean I don't want to hear about the past (my own childhood as well as from long before I was born).

My Mum's advice has always proved to be good, and I will certainly heed this one!

By the way, my next book review will tie in nicely with this post. 

29 comments:

  1. I was very pleased to find a tape I made of my Mum over ten years ago. I just switched the machine on when we were talking, I don't know if she even knew, but it's lovely to have a record of our conversation and I remember how interesting it was talking to her.

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    1. Voices are so strong in evoking the image of a person in us, aren't they! The voice of my late husband was one of the things I loved about him particularly. I have no recording of his voice, and I am not sure if I'd be able to listen to it if I did.

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    2. My mother was blind in her last ten years, and we gave her a cassette recorder to talk her thoughts, when seh was alone. I still have this dear tape, on which she is talking, singing, speaking little poems she made herself. It is really a treasure for me.

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  2. I cannot tell you how much I love this post, your mother's good advice to listen to the stories of older folks while they are still around. I have always loved to hear the true life stories that anyone will share with me. And I love the wide open spaces of your photos! I am hoping that my mountain photos are one of the blogs that you mean! I am hoping to walk on one of them as soon as the ice melts!!

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    1. Of course your mountain photos are among those I meant, Kay!
      I am looking forward to a "Spring On Arabia Mountain" post from you soon :-)

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    2. Hello Kay, I'm glad, that you love my post, thank you for your kindly comment.

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  3. Yes, this is very good advice! To this day i treasure the memories of my grandmother's stories, and i encourage my children to ask their grandparents for stories, too.

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    1. They should also ask you, as the generation closest to their own, but I am sure they do that as well.

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    2. Thank you for your kindly comment, you are quite right encouraging your children!

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  4. oh wise words, I'm like you Meike, so interested in the past and the person in the family who has the 'answers' for now, more than my older brother and sister who is eight yrs older than I. But still how I miss the old stories! Ha! Now I am the one who has to tell them
    xx
    julie

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    1. Glad you enjoyed this post and can identify with it so well, Julie!

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    2. Hello Julie, thank you for your kindly comment. The same with us: My husband and I are the last persons of the family in our generation.

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  5. ps
    thanks to your mother for a heartfelt postxx

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  6. I so agree with your mother......I did listen and my family talked lots about old stories. But after my mother died I realized there were many questions that had never come up, questions that only she could answer...I think it may be difficult to know which questions one will wish to have asked when it is too late, but at least it is something about.

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    1. True; how are we to know the "unknown unknowns"?

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  7. And one other comment I would like to make is this: memories is a bit tricky, a bit imprecise, a bit deceptive at times......My husband and I were both family historians and sometimes we went to many different members of his family (for instance) to ask about events in which each person questioned had been a participant. One thing we asked about was their escape from Hungary in early '57. Every person had somewhat different memories. They did not even agree on who was the driving force behind the decision to leave, let alone the different things that happened during the few days it took to reach the border and cross it. It was very surprising for us, but also very enlightening.

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    1. Oh yes, human memory is very unreliable - ask anyone who has ever had to take a statement from an eyewitness to an accident or crime!
      I find it interesting to compare what different bits about the same event different people do remember, and how some events have completely slipped my mind, without them being traumatic. My sister and I are only one year apart and so experienced a lot of exactly the same things during our childhood and youth, and yet we have perceived some of them quite differently.

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    1. Hello Kristi, thank you for your kindly comments, you are quite right in every single item! Memory is a very versatile thing.

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  9. I so identify with your mum, Meike. As my uncle reached the end of his life two years ago, I tried in vain to garner fragments of family history from his increasingly muddled brain, but to no avail. I inherited boxes full of photos, but all without names. Without identity, they have lost any value they might have had. Well done your mum, for such good advice.

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    1. That's a shame about all the photos. I am sure you'll recognize some people yourself, or there will be a family resemblance, but those with no identity to them are really useless.

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    2. Hello Frances, thank you for your kindly comment and your understanding. We have a lot of old photo-albums from my and my husband's parents, but fortunately all superscribed and marked with names of persons and places, and that is a good part of history als well.

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  10. Well Meike's Mum I, too, have reached the stage in my life where there are few of the generations before me left (and even my generation is diminishing). Your advice is very sound and I hope that the generations following us will ask as much as they can. Much that has happened in our family has been reasonably well documented but, so far, neither my brother no I have any grand-children. Perhaps there will not be anyone to ask questions in the future.

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    1. I wonder how yours and your brother's blogs will be preserved, Graham. One day in the far future, one of your descendants may read them, and they will then know quite a lot about your daily (and not-so-daily) lives, the places you lived at, the people you knew and the things you did.

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    2. Hello Graham, you are quite right, my husband and I are the last persons of our generation now, and we also can see the diminishing around us. The more it is important to take the last chance to pose questions for the young ones.

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    3. Meike I back up my blog (by exporting it) regularly but when I get back to the UK this year I intend to start having them printed. I know a number of people who have done this (for holiday blogs and blogs when they have been working abroad) and they are super. My blog started as a sort of diary and information bulletin anyway.

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  11. "Use the chance to learn about the past, otherwise it will be lost for all times."...Your mother gives good advice Arian. I know we are coming to a time when there won't be boxes of family photos to sift through but those of us who have them should take the opportunity to label our photos as much as possible so that succeeding generations will know who was who, what was what and where was that.

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    1. Last but not least, when was the picture taken. On some pictures, the date is printed on the back automatically, but on many more, there is no date. We can guess quite well more or less when something happened by looking at the clothes and hairstyles of people, but not always. My Auntie Jean who lives in Chapeltown always writes the who-is-who on the back of each photo she sends me. Very good of her, I think!

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    2. Thank you for your kindly comment, I agree, that old photos are only valuable, when they are labeled.

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