In the post-Christmas packing away, while looking for something else (which I still haven’t found, of course) I came upon three cassette tapes in a chest in the living room. One contains folk songs and train wreck ballads sung by husband and sent to me as many years ago as a cassette tape implies, while we were courting from opposite sides of the country. He knows I am a sucker for hearing him sing (I have always, alas, been easily seduced by boys who sing, although not lately and not since him). The other side has a selection of love poems.
The second tape is poetry from me, to him. No songs, as I cannot carry a tune in a bucket, possibly why I am so susceptible to those who can.
The third is an interview with my mother, conducted by me before her death, sometime in the late nineties, about family history. It isn’t just the history and family tales I value that tape for, although the description of how to kite a check, an emergency banking technique impossible now due to instant communication, was worth the time in itself. It’s the voices. There is a carnal, earthly sense to the human voice that you can’t get from a sheet of paper. When it tells you a story or sings you a song, it is there, in your head, not outside you on the page.
My ex-husband’s widow kept his voice on their answering machine for years after he died. It may be there still and I know, oh I know, why she did it. They come back to us in those old recordings. If you close your eyes, they are here, next to you. The human voice says things that print cannot. We keep them, transferring them to each new technology lest they slip away. Each time they have something new to say to us. I have mined my mother’s stories for endless fictional details but the stories are always better when she tells them.
Sit your relatives down while you have them, and find out the family secrets. The older they get and the older you get, the more likely they are to spill the beans. Give them a glass of wine and sit at their feet. Turn the microphone on.
The second tape is poetry from me, to him. No songs, as I cannot carry a tune in a bucket, possibly why I am so susceptible to those who can.
The third is an interview with my mother, conducted by me before her death, sometime in the late nineties, about family history. It isn’t just the history and family tales I value that tape for, although the description of how to kite a check, an emergency banking technique impossible now due to instant communication, was worth the time in itself. It’s the voices. There is a carnal, earthly sense to the human voice that you can’t get from a sheet of paper. When it tells you a story or sings you a song, it is there, in your head, not outside you on the page.
My ex-husband’s widow kept his voice on their answering machine for years after he died. It may be there still and I know, oh I know, why she did it. They come back to us in those old recordings. If you close your eyes, they are here, next to you. The human voice says things that print cannot. We keep them, transferring them to each new technology lest they slip away. Each time they have something new to say to us. I have mined my mother’s stories for endless fictional details but the stories are always better when she tells them.
Sit your relatives down while you have them, and find out the family secrets. The older they get and the older you get, the more likely they are to spill the beans. Give them a glass of wine and sit at their feet. Turn the microphone on.