Nearly five years ago, the morning after the day he was born, I started writing a letter to my grandson. He shares my dad’s name, Vern, and it occurred to me that he ought to know whatever I could tell him about Dad.
The letter became a book because things I discovered in the endeavor struck me as significant. Some of things are about Dad and some of those things are about the community where he grew up. It’s a letter to Vern, and that’s the best part.
Once a summer, in the final 15 years of his life, my grandfather rode a Greyhound bus back to visit his boyhood home in Kansas, a home that he lost because his mother died when he was eleven. In my research, I discovered the marker “Pop” visited every year in the Miami County, Kansas, Fontana cemetery. On Mary Beck Shroyer’s grave, an always 11-year-old read, “Mother.”
I thought about Pop’s gaze through a bus window as I wrote my book:and that I should have been on the bus with him, for the view, for answers to questions I did not know I had, for stories he could have shared, for getting to know my dad’s dad, and so that he could know me. I could have had that, could have taken a summer away from 4-H and little league.
It occurred to me that my book is that bus ride for me and my grandson. I hope I’m around for some questions.
There are over 300 source citations in When Once Destroyed; those are for the parts about why and how Dad’s community came to be destroyed. Especially for the people who still live nearby, I need evidence to substantiate my narrative.But, because the book is a letter to my grandson, I don’t have to pretend that I’m objective. It’s about “us,” not about “them.”
That it’s a letter is a gift that allows me to speak to my grandson from my perspective, the perspective of a descendent of the ordinary people whose lives were nonchalantly devastated by some powerful people who didn’t live there, for what is commonly called “progress” and the “greater good.” I wonder if the stories of who we are that focused almost entirely on the objective “them” contribute to the damage done to “us.”
A character in Daniel Mason’s great novel North Woods says the discoveries of an “amateur historian” are greeted with mockery, the “stain of dilettantism.” Is that me? I’m trained as a journalist and a high school English teacher, so I understand the demands of documentation, but I’m not a person with a Ph.D. I’m not a scholar and I’m not an expert.I’m a guy who wants to tell his grandson about his dad. Just this once, though, let me say, that makes the story better. Dad’s life and the life of his former community provide us with an example worth noting.
Worth noting, also, among the many influences that shaped the book, is my training as a Holocaust educator. The best of that training came from the ground up, too.It came from learning first hand about a great loss in the life of a survivor, and it came from listening to other Holocaust and social justice educators speak first hand about what happens in their classrooms, and what happened in their communities. I learned about lost communities from an Oklahoma teacher, about the 1921 Tulsa massacre, and from a Montana teacher, about the institutionalized desecration of indigenous graves.As I recount in the book, the most memorable of those lessons came from a German educator on the grounds of the Bergen-Belsen camp memorial who told a room full of Americans about our responsibility to tell the whole, often uncomfortable, truth to our children and grandchildren.
My grandson gave me the opportunity to do that with obscure lives in a place that passes mostly without notice. It’s the story I have to tell. What I gained in the opportunity was a chance to acknowledge the point of view of ordinary people whose perspective is lost in the name of what’s good for the narrative that powerful people create for their own benefit and then judge “objectively”in their own criteria, with all the force of what they this week call “the bandwidth.”Missing, I conclude, is humanity, the perspective of the people on the ground, when what powerful people tell us is good, falls down from the sky. And, that it’s the absence of that perspective that makes what is socially and environmentally destructive in the name of “progress” possible.
That’s what I noticed in a story that began as a letter to my grandson. Maybe you have a story to tell.
Music: “A Distant Star” - Great Lake Swimmers
