Thank you to Librarians Matter and Snail for today’s blog post prompt.
I have been pondering Kathryn’s question “What two visual items remind you of your parents?” all afternoon since I read her post this afternoon.
It has been 14 months since my mother passed away. My father passed away 18 months prior to that. I think of my mother much more than my father but I was closer to my mother. My father and I were close but at times it could be a bit rocky. As a moody tween and teen I did even say I hated him.
But even so, I thought of the one item for my Dad first. It is a small notebook. He used to carry one in his top shirt pocket every where he went along with a pen. He would jot down his plans for things. He may not have been a big talker but he was always thinking. If he was going on long car trips, he would write down where he was going to stop. If he was preparing a dinner for one of the many volunteer organisations he was involved in, he would devise the menu and quantities required. Somewhere I have one or two of his notebooks and reading them bring back so many memories.
The item for my mother also involves writing. It is a daily diary. My mother wrote in a diary most days of her life, well at least since the early eighties. Also for the last 25 years or so that was her Christmas present from my brother. A predictable but always lovingly received gift. After my mother passed away I found her box of diaries in a cupboard. I haven’t read all of them yet but I what I have read has been insightful and memory inducing. She never wrote long diatribes, more like a list of daily activities but enough to gain a picture of what was important to her. I found an entry about ET coming soon to the movies, and a follow-up entry of when we went to see it. All the friends that had been posted to other places, some I remember, some I don’t (we were a defence force family). In later years there was the recording of rainfall, haircuts and bingo wins. For the data nerd in me my future plan is to transcribe all the diaries and analyse the data to see what patterns I can find. But for now they are there to read when I want a trip down memory lane.
As I get older, and even more so since my parents have passed, I think about who I am and where those traits came from. Today’s exercise has helped me to realise that I have more in common with my Dad that I previously thought.
That was a lovely, gentle read. I continue to be fascinated by the sense of being the melting pot of my parents: a thing from her, a thing from him. This thing I am has all those things though not necessarily in the same measures.