Telling Stories

The way I convinced Universe Man to give “The Chosen” another try was by telling him that it takes place in the same place that Grandma grew up. My children are hungry for information about how I grew up, how the LSH grew up, how our parents grew up. A couple of weeks ago we all ate cookies that used to be a special treat when I was growing up. They didn’t taste as good to me now as they did then, but who knows if that is memory or if the cookies really did change somewhere along the way?

The funny thing about the cookies is that my Dad doesn’t remember them at all, and I don’t know if my sister and brother do either. I wonder how many things there are that only I remember, how many things there are about my childhood that I might not think to pass on.

I realize now that I actually know very little about my mother’s childhood. All I have are snapshots, vignettes. And there is no one now alive who can tell me. I was shocked to learn this summer from my mother’s cousin that all of the cousins used to get together every week when they were growing up at their grandparents house (or maybe it was just the grandmother by that time – I’m not sure). She showed me some pictures from one of these gatherings and said that my mother would have been there but wasn’t in that picture. My mother never mentioned anything like that. In fact, she never talked about her grandparents at all.

All I can do is tell my children the stories I do know, tell them my own memories, tell them the stories of things that they don’t remember because they were too young, tell them stories of someone they no longer remember or never met. The story about my mother taking Universe Man to the wrong hospital the day Mr. Personality was born. The story about Universe Man eating pistachio ice cream with my mother. That he read to her, though he can’t remember it, that she saw Mr. Personality the day he was born and saw him walk and talk before she died.

Memory is all there is now, and it isn’t enough. It will never be enough.

Refraction

It’s amazing how different the experience of reading a book can be at different times. This is most true of great books, but I suppose also happens with lesser ones. What was exciting the first time is boring the second, what was cute is trite. But a couple of decades can give you a whole different perspective on a book.

Universe Man is currently reading “The Chosen” by Chaim Potok. We tried him on it about a month ago and it didn’t take, but when I suggested it again, he started reading, and he has abandoned the much more conventionally exciting children’s fantasy book he was reading to devour this one. I’m not entirely certain why this book has captured an 8 ½ year old so completely, but I will ask him. After he finishes it.

I first read “The Chosen” when I was only a few years older than he is now. I might have re-read it in junior high or high school, but I certainly haven’t read it since then, so it occurred to me that maybe it was time to re-read, if only so that I could discuss it with Universe Man. (That is both one of the joys and burdens of a reader like Universe Man. I can discuss books with him and it is fabulous, but I spend an awful lot of time finding him books and reading them so that I can make sure the content is appropriate and so I can be ready to talk to him about them.)

What a difference a few decades and parenthood makes! When I first read “The Chosne,” it was my window into a piece of the world in which my mother grew up. Of course, she was born after the events in the book take place, and she didn’t grow up in quite that world, but that’s what my mother told me when she handed me the book those many years ago, and that’s what I got out of it.

What I took from it now is something completely different. It seems to me now that the book concerns itself with any number of questions, but most importantly with the dynamic of parents and children, and with how parents raise their children. Which is not an unimportant issue in my own life these days, and of course something I could not possibly comprehend when I was 10 or when I was in high school. The struggle to raise a brilliant child to be a moral human being looms enormous in my own life and I cannot recall ever having seen this struggle so clearly depicted as in this book. Actually, until I got to the end of the book, I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms at all, even as I feel my way through it.

I will be interested to find out what Universe Man thinks of the book when he’s done with it. I haven’t yet decided whether I will talk to him about the ways in which the book is so very different for me now than when I first read it. Probably not. I’ll just tell him that he should be sure to re-read it when he’s a parent himself.