Miner 49er

The world is full of intentions. Everyone is trying to figure out how to live, whether through an occupation or a supposition. More things clamor for our attention that we have the capacity to experience, and so we sift like 49ers tapping metal pans with the heels of their palms, searching for the gleam of something precious amid the dull piles of rock and mud. Tap tap. The noise, rhythmic as a heartbeat, is swept up in the gurgling of shallow waters. Tap tap. Faintly now, but the wet hands of the miners keep pounding, squirting arcs of spray, mule's spit. On clear days, the sun seems to jump into the water, they squint their eyes until the pans are outlined in phosphorescent shadows. The younger miners are more apt to stop, reach into the pan with puckering mouths that soon tighten into lipless lines when their hands are filled with pennies or nails. Tap tap. The gentle along with the violent. Tap tap. Until all hands are wrinkled, useless, and cease.

I'm not certain what that image is supposed to mean, if anything.

But it may be about death.

In my family, see, we tell a lot of stories----mostly family-related. It is a ritual to tell certain stories, some of them about relatives I have never even met. Yet I know their lives more intimately than some of my living relations. Telling stories is always a simplification, a way to make sense out of someone's life. We tell stories so that they are not forgotten---that the past is made a part of the present. To leave a story untold or to forget is worse than telling lies. I find the greatest tragedies are not so much those who suffered the worst catastrophes because 'everybody hurts', as the song says ( I derive all my seeming-wisdom from song lyrics:). The worse thing that can happen is to have no stories told about you when you are no longer able to tell them yourself.

My mother's father is a good example. He died before my mom could get to know him, and since the circumstances of his death were, well, horrific, her family did everything to forget the whole messy incident. It's quite understandable, but I think Lee was more than the tragedy he became. He was a paratrooper in WW2---the man fell out of the sky on D-Day. We only know this because my dad looked up his service information on the Internet. It's not everything about the man, but it is something to remember. When I went to France, I wondered what he had seen and done to survive in that foreign place, so that he could survive, and I could walk down those same landscapes with the descendants of the German soldiers that he fought. Two generations had changed the world so much, and yet...I have no idea what he would say. I can't sit down with him and compare our impressions over coffee or sweet tea, or cafe au lait.

Circumstances can cause people to be forgotten, but sometimes people are forgotten because they were too afraid, too private to share the nitty-gritty. No one wants to be a whiner, or to draw too much attention (we just have different points of saturation). I understand the motivation to say what seems appropriate, every life is worth hearing about. It saddens me when people cannot seem to form one word that reveals some truth about who they really are and come from. Every story is worth knowing---especially to those we love, or who would learn to love us. Love is in the details, not in the generalities so many of us try to hide behind. I want every sordid little speck, as well as the glittering nuggets, from those I love. Anything else is fool's gold.


dreadful sorry, Clementine