Lately I have been reading, or at least skimming, the obituary columns in the newspapers. A recurrent theme in more than a few writeups is how the deceased are remembered for their storytelling and recitations of their memories of a long-ago childhood. I can picture a rapt audience sitting around the dinner table while Grandpa recounts war stories, and raves on about the first car he ever owned. And Grandma with her children and grandchildren paying rapt attention while she tells them what life was like in her courting days, and how different schools and teachers were.
Maybe the surviving obituary writers have actual memories of those old-timer stories; maybe they are realizing too late that they should have listened to those tales told by someone who will never do so again; maybe those writers live in a parallel universe. But if they do indeed yearn for stories from the past, I can tell them, in no particular order, :
* What it was like to grow up in a house with no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no telephone.
* How a parent living in the country struggled to have her child attend school with no schoolbus transportation.
* How the same parent, in isolation, had to wait for the mailman in order to seek medical attention during her children's emergencies.
* What a home looks like after a SWAT team tosses a flashbang into a window and searches for a gun.
* How you feel after the door to your home is kicked in and your house burglarized, on 2 separate occasions.
* The excitement and terror of bobsledding down Mt Von Hoevenberg with your sled riding the outside bank the whole way and you're completely blinded by the cast-off ice.
* The surprise of having an entire Canadian hockey team take the floor pre-game and welcome you by name to the game
* Being "kidnapped" in your car by an overzealous airport employee for being in the wrong area. (I wasn't the driver.
* Cruising on the Mississippi River and having your traveling companion be surprised when meeting her mom's neighbors from her hometown
* Being in a party of invited guests to the inner sanctums of a Playboy Club
* Having a pelican poop on your head as you walked from your room to the pool
* Finding you sister's long missing cat, Willie, on a random visit to the Menands Animal Shelter
* Riding a chair lift to a very steep mountain at Mt. Snow and being to afraid to ski off.
* Medical /Health-related accounts of missed diagnoses, misdiagnoses, surgeries, radiation, chemo, and diagnoses yet to come
* Wading through a government process, the outcome of which by most accounts was speculative at best.
* Walking, hiking, traipsing in the unknown banks of Lake Pontchartrain with a Brit who was out to walk its entire length, which we learned later is about 24 miles.
* Winning the Power Ball ( Life is but a dream.
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