We Forget

The above is a picture of Lillian Gish, one of America's greatest film actresses.

Her film career ran three quarters of a century, from silent shorts in 1912, to The Whales of August in 1987. She lived 99 years.

As you might can tell from the above photo, she specialized in playing the innocent waif, someone who was buffeted by strong forces, whether by nature or by evil men.  She often found an inner strength that would allow her to survive and grow, where others might surrender.

Some of you may dimly recognize the name.  A few may be film buffs who treasure movies and famous performers, particularly from the silent era.   But many of you are probably going, "Lillian who?"

Here we have this great invention, film, and it should allow us to preserve and cherish the memory of performances past, and somehow, for the most part, it just gets discarded like everything else.

One film out of a hundred survives into the next era.  I don't just mean in film preservation, I mean in ones that are watched and cherished.  Many times, the film is remade, and we associate it with more current actors.

But it's not just celebrities we lose.  We lose our own family.  Many are familiar with their parents and grandparents, but how many are familiar with those before that?  If you're lucky, someone in your family of a genealogical bent, may have preserved and/or reconstructed a lineage that goes past the last two or three generations.  But even when they do, many of the other family members simply ignore it, or have very little interest in it.

I try, but ultimately, I am as guilty as everyone else.  It's not easy encompassing the scope of the past. I realize how important it is to know who we are and where we came from.  And even though we have the means to preserve it (film, photographs, film, video, books), we still let it slip away.

I was given a gift, and I have failed to follow up on it.  I have over a half-dozen binders, filled with hundreds of pages, crammed with special words and photos from my father, crafting a history of our family, going back over thirteen generations.  After his passing in 2013, I started to log these stories under the title Stories From a Stony Land, with the intent of assembling a book.  Life charged forward, and after a few months, I stopped posting those stories.

Now I am semi-retired from accounting.  And I hope to soon renew my efforts in reading, posting and collating my Dad's stories.

Memory is a fragile thing, particularly in trying to pass it from one generation to the next.  Pushing against the rushing tide of the present, and the anticipation of future waves,  it may seem like a daunting task, but it is something important to me, and whether successful or not, I have to try.  Because to do otherwise is to concede certain defeat.

If Lillian Gish can fight the forces of nature and indifferent people, why can't I?

Embrace the past.  Cherish the present.  Dream the future.