Dad's Family History

Dad with Simon, who is not included in the family history

My father Elmo toiled over a hot laptop during the past few years, recollecting family legends and collecting and scanning fading photographs. He took it as a responsibility in his role as family patriarch (a word that must translate from a form of last man standing) to make sure that the stories of our past were preserved in some manner. Always a voracious reader, I think he found great pleasure by committing his family’s history from the mere thought of it to a more embraceable digital permanence, in the process becoming the writer he always secretly wished himself to be.

We just posted Dad’s project to a server in the cloud. I confess that I didn’t give those stories more than a scan until he mentioned last week that family members were not receiving his e-mailed copies and, when they did, were unable to open the file. We fixed the problem, first by splitting the file into multiple chapters, and then finding a public area in cyberspace to hold them (even split, the files were too large to send via e-mail). The final fixes were of my own personal recipe – converting the file formats from the annoyingly unfriendly (but free, which is always Dad’s preference) Microsoft Works (.wks) word processor to Word-compatibility. Lastly, I edited the whole thing for punctuation, substituting AP-Style for whatever it was they taught Dad at James Monroe High School in the Bronx in those years before the discovery of ink. I left his words (and his unique paragraph spacing) in the order and condition in which they were found, because so much of what is considered history is contained in the telling and in its appearance.

In the process of deleting spaces, moving commas and repainting possessive pronouns, I read deeply into Dad’s work. Memory is selective and history is memory’s collecting pool, where the light shines brightest through its gossamer surface elements and grows dimmer traveling through the heavier murk. The more vivid parts of the whole story were from those years he cherished most, that all of us cherish most in retrospect – that time when we first fully grasp a sense of Self. A combination of Self-consciousness, Self-awareness and Self-worth comes together at the same moment of our discovery of the universal set of laws that govern our existence. We acknowledge the inevitability of death and, in doing, truly appreciate life for the first time.

This is the period we remember best, when Life became our first love. We can never forget that feeling when youthful vulnerability first mixed with both wonder and courageous ignorance. We were still children in body and mind, but the world around us was beginning to shrink, leaving the momentary impression that this new state of affairs would continue always. It is the moment when metamorphosis becomes a reality; the cocoon is shed and wings unfold. It is also a point-of-no-return, which is why the memory of it remains so clear, long after subsequent events are buried beyond reach in the mind’s archive. It will always be this moment for us, when we are truly born into the world and begin to understand the rhythmic miracle of both heartbeat and breath.

I am glad that Dad did this for us, not only for its value as a record of our past, but also as a self-portrait of the writer. It is not just a reflection of him, by him, but a grander statement regarding his place and, by extension, ours. This is the only true measure of history, in the end: how it describes a world that seems to change constantly and yet never really does. We are doomed to repeat history, as we are compelled to look back upon it, if for no reason other than a desire to feel alive once more.

Dad’s history of the Accettas can be found here - http://bit.ly/vMzI0h