History

During the Depression, my grandfather, an honest and holy man, stole bottles of milk from outside the local butcher's shop. He said he had to, he did it "for the baby" (my dad.) After a couple of weeks, Grandad went and told the butcher he owed him four bottles milk. The butcher just smiled slightly and said, "I was wondering what happened to those."

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I was sixteen when my Grandad died. At sixteen you just can't know how important it will be to you to know your ancestors. To know you who you came from. And it's not as if I was a big jerk back then, my grandfather was ninety-two when he died, and in failing health after a series of accidents. He was also very hard of hearing and I never felt comfortable yelling at him.

When he died, I was sad but I pushed away at a persistent guilt born from our inability to communicate with each other and fear that I would never know him.

But, three years after I was born, my father and his sister walked with my grandfather through the neighborhood he grew up in and sat with him in the home that he built and tape recorded his memories about his life including the one about stealing milk for his newborn son.

Those tapes just sat in my dad's vast audio library gathering dust. Until Matt showed him how, with just a $4 cable, one can convert the technology of yesterday into the technology of, well, a more recent yesterday.

So, I spent a week with my Dad in my parents basement cutting and manipulating the rough 21-year-old audio into coherent tracks that we burned onto CD to give to our relatives at the family reunion we were having to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Grandad's birth.

It was one of the most amazing and fulfilling experiences I have ever had, sitting with my dad for hours on end, being coaxed to continue past midnight with promises of fancy imported beer, and getting to know a man who, in no small way, made my existence possible.

I learned that his family once owned a horse and buggy, that he dropped out of school in eight grade when "they plugged that algebra deal on us," that when he danced with my grandmother for the first time (she was, on that night, his co-worker's date) that she breathlessly said, "Mr. Wilson, you sure do twirl nice!" He moved to D.C. at fourteen and got a job at a bank and faithfully, for the duration of my great-grandparents' lives, traveled back to Maryland each Sunday for dinner.

He was rational, and strong, and soulful, and wise. He saw almost an entire century , one hundred years of change. He seemed to say, that not matter what happened in the world - what destruction, what war, what death, what hatred - that life goes on and there continues to be love, and goodness, and faith, and family.

This awesome man beams from all those words we transferred. And now, I know him.