I wish I knew more about those who came before

The other day I was listening to a son interview his father on NPR's National Day of Listening. I think it was the last story they were going to record after doing so for a long time. They mentioned that it might be a good idea to sit down with a family member or friend and listen to their life story. If my father were alive, he would be a fine individual to listen to. He loved to tell stories and could do so with enthusiasm and skill. I caught myself wishing that I could sit down with him and hear some more about his life.
Then I remembered that shortly after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, he made many tapes recording his life as he experienced it. Since he was an intelligent man with many opinions, most of them well thought-out, these tapes are more than a little interesting to a daughter who loved and respected her dad. I have listened to only a couple of these tapes and I now fear that they may have deteriorated. I want to get them to someone who can turn them into a digital recording that I can keep for my children and grandchildren to listen to if they have the inclination.
My mother's family is all gone. My dad's last remaining sister died about a year ago and her husband died a few months ago. No one of their generation is left to answer questions we may have about how Grandpa Henry came to this country at the turn of the century or how he met Florence Greene and married her. We may never know about the mystery of my mother's family: she had two half-brothers. That's all we know - that her mother must have been married before she married our grandfather and had our mother was never openly addressed while Mom was alive. Her parents died before I was in the third grade so they are only vague memories in a young child's mind.
It is really sad that we know so little of our family history. I am sure it is interesting. My dad's father came from Austria-Poland and was Jewish. My mother's family is from England and Wales. She told us that Twiggy, the skinny model who ushered the waif look into the modeling world, is a cousin. All our grandparents who were alive when we were children loved us, but Grandpa Henry died before my father got married. Something to do with the stock market crash, I think.
I do remember something: My father graduated from high school when he was fifteen. He went out west and worked for a year to earn college money by painting huge oil refinery tanks. He narrowly missed being hurt in a fire in one of those refineries and when he came home to go to college, my Nana had spent all his savings on a wedding for one of his sisters. Oh my. He did get to Penn State and walked on for the football team which did not choose to use his talents. Then he joined the fledgling lacrosse team and found the sport he loved and a coach he respected.
If I want to know more, I need to listen to his tapes. I need to become less involved in the daily minutia of my life and become immersed in his and my mother's as revealed by the tapes. And I will - soon, because I am getting to an age that demands that I know more about where and who I came from. I guess as we get older, we have a bit more time for family history as well as the interest to dig into the past.
Who knows, maybe I will leave an audio history of my life for my progeny, although I cannot believe they would ever be interested in the humdrum life of a woman who lived during the advent of television, who witnessed the first man walking on the moon, who lived through presidential impeachments, four wars so far, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the bombing of the World Trade Center, the introduction and proliferation of the digital world, social networking, the Ipad...and on and on. Hmm, maybe my life hasn't been so humdrum after all.

Richard Wilbur writes a beautiful poem about his daughter:

The Writer
by Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.