"What were you thinking, Mom?"

Winter holidays, whether we love it or not, tend to stir old memories. If we still have older folks with whom we can have conversations, what are the questions we should ask?

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This week I called my Aunt Helen just to chat. I’m not saying her age but I’m past seventy and she’s my aunt so I guess neither of us are ingénues. It was a fun conversation, she’s smart and cheerful. Also, I learned new information about my parents. And our nation.

Such as this. I remember my dad joking about following a firetruck to see where it was going … and it drove to HIS printing business. What I didn’t understand was that it wasn’t funny when it happened; he and my mom nearly lost their livelihood in that fire. They had to move to a new location and buy new equipment and supplies while they were already up to their ears in business loans. How could they repay debt without their business? Somehow they kept going and it says a lot about their smarts and determination that they did that.

It also shows the postwar American economy. Those loans were from a local bank; those loan officers would have known my dad, his family, and his story as well as my mom, her folks, and her story. Their character and reputation were known in the community and it was that familiarity that allowed them to borrow more  money and eventually thrive. I don’t think the giant conglomerate banks we deal with now would have lent more funds to a burned out small hometown business. 

But consider how it worked out. They were small yet they were the biggest printer for sixty miles. Ludington was a tourist mecca with dozens of tourist related businesses, and as well there were dozens of factories and services. My folks provided the brochures and forms for them all. An enormous pumped storage power plant was built 1969 to 1973. By then my mother and brother ran Danielson Colorprint and, I know because I delivered completed jobs after school, my family printed most of the forms used by most of the construction companies that built that huge project. 

It made a difference that a local bank lent my folks more money after their business burned. It also strengthened our town that they existed; if someone needed to get something printed, Danielson Colorprint was right there. Didn’t have to order it from China to be delivered by Amazon. 

Our old stories are not always just personal stories. 

Helen remembered my parents’ wedding in October 1942. Why did they get married as the US was entering WWII? I don't know. Why didn't I ask? 

Aunt Helen was about fourteen when she went with her family to Ludington’s docks to wave to my dad as he and other draftees boarded a car ferry to Manitowoc where they would get the train to Basic Training in Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. 

My dad parlayed the year he worked at the Motorola plant in Chicago, into specialized Army training to become a lineman (restringing telephone wires). He followed the front lines through Sicily and Italy for more than a year. 

There are echoes in families. At 14 I hugged my brother as he left for Vietnam. And my brother, like our dad, didn’t just do basic training. He parlayed his life experiences into medic training and paratrooping school – staving off the day he’d go to the actual war. Danielsons do what they have to do but they skew it slower and sideways if they can. 

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I’m going to talk with Aunt Helen again soon so I’ve been thinking about questions to ask. How do we learn our particular stories while also seeing how those stories fit into American history? What did the generation above us fight through that connects us to our heritage? What is the difference between sentimentality and patriotism? Did they really inhabit a world where “when men were men” and “women cheerfully fulfilled women’s roles.” My mom and grandmother ran that little printing business through WWII. When her husband died young, one grandmother, at age 28 with two young sons, began working at any job she could get. Where were LGBTQ people when all men and women were straight (hah)? 

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1. Did your family move and travel or did they stay in one place? If they moved, what mode or transportation did they use?

My grandfather took a passenger ship from Ludington to Chicago when he was just out of high school. The trip took eight hours. My parents each lived in Chicago a bit when they finished high school; I think they said the train trip took 5-8 hours. But when I wanted to travel from Chicago to Ludington on public transportation, there was only the Greyhound bus which too ten hours. Curious, isn’t it?

Did you notice that part about young adults going to The Big City when they were around twenty? What do young adults need to do in those first years out of high school? I can’t answer this question, but we are not the first ones to face it. 

2. What did people eat? Did your parents and grandparents eat well? Were they hungry? What they ate often tells us in what decade they lived and how much economic stability they knew. 

During the Depression 60 million people, out of a population of 123 million, were affected by hunger. One out of two. Today fifty-four million Americans (twenty million are kids) are affected by hunger out of a population of 350 million. One out of seven. If your family didn’t or doesn’t know hunger, you are unusual. How do periods of chronic hunger affect a family?

3. Ask about pets and presents. Remember when a kid might, if she was lucky, get ONE Barbie doll? (Aunt Helen gave me mine, along with handknit outfits!) Did you realize modern kids generally own a passel of Barbies? There are dark jokes here about what happens to a society with so many Barbies. 

Did those pets of yore also work? Chase actual mice? Guard the house, kids, and farm? Do any of us have worker pets these days? (As I sit here my cat is an arm’s length from my keyboard, sitting on a soft cloth, monitoring our neighborhood from the window. I’m not sure we could call this work.) 

4. How did folks know when they were in love? Did they tell each other? If one felt extremely fond of another did they automatically get married? How did they decide to marry and how big was the wedding? 

5. Did they know people who were gay? Maybe a better question is “Did you know adults who never married - and what were they like?” Not every single person was gay and not every LGBTQ person was single, but it’s a curious place to ask questions. I remember particular single teachers and missionaries who were often the most fun, most compassionate, most well-grounded in their identity. Now that we are this old, can we wonder?

6. What era was the “best” era? Was it during peace or conflict? 

7. Were people who “drink too much” the most or the least successful people in the family? Consider James Baldwin’s, "I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain." 

If you don’t have convenient elders in your world, then answer these for yourself.