I’ve had the opportunity lately to spend a lot of time with my mom, who is 83, and my spouse’s grandmother, who will be 90 this year. They both like to tell stories, and I’ve noticed lately that the stories of each tend to coalesce around a theme.
My mom’s theme is, roughly, I Was a Victim. She has a long list of people who have wronged her, going back to her mother who was in a tuberculosis sanitarium during most of my mom’s childhood, and continuing through my dad and many other people in her life. It often seems to me that she clutches her grudges like shiny pebbles, refusing to let any of them go even as other things slip away.
My grandmother-in-law’s theme could be called I Was Right All Along But No One Would Listen Until It Was Too Late. She does have some quite hair-raising medical stories to tell, and in many cases she probably was right all along. (She would have been a formidable doctor, or village Wise Woman.)
Having noticed this, I started wondering what my theme might be. I’m deathly afraid that it is I Coulda Been a Contenda. What a dirty rotten shame that would be! Perhaps I should do something about that.
Worth another book,
I think it has been done a few times although no title/author comes to mind. At least three more patterns of stories that I have seen or introspected, would be the
“I did, often with smug satisfaction”, “I saw with a variety of emotional tones” and “My friend did/was at, or I heard about…”
L DeGroff
April 28th, 2008