I heard voices from the past this week. Voices of family members who have passed, on a cassette tape. It was both comforting and difficult to listen to them. As the tape rolled, I had to step away and walk outside a few times because I felt myself getting emotional and missing them so much. The people who shaped my young life. The ones I loved with all my heart.
The cassette tape was in a Ziploc bag with a few others that I found last year when I was cleaning out my parents’ house after my mom died. Of course, I laughed when I saw that Mom had saved several cassette tapes. She used to like to record them. Upon closer inspection, I saw that they held conversations with family members. I was only on one tape…well actually, two. I was also on an answering machine tape she had saved where I got to hear my dad’s voice again along with that of my Aunt Edie. On that tape, there was an answering machine message from me to my mom saying I had just called to chat. Boy, did I ever sound young.
As I listened, alone in my sunroom, it felt as if I was transported back to May of 1988 and was sitting at my kitchen table in Kalamazoo, Michigan with my mom and my grandfather. I was 27 years old and a new mom. We were having coffee and talking and laughing. My mom was smoking. I could hear her light cigarettes and take puffs while she talked. I could almost smell her cigarette smoke and see it swirling above our heads at the table.
I don’t know why we made the tape. It was long, over an hour. I asked several questions about things from the past so maybe we were just documenting family history for posterity. Since I was a new mom, they told me stories from when I was a baby and a little girl. Apparently, my grandfather had bought us our first color TV back in the mid-1960’s and he said he bought it so I could watch Saturday morning cartoons. He said he wanted me to be able to watch cartoons in color. I remember sitting on the living room rug right in front of that TV watching Underdog, The Jetsons, and The Road Runner Show. (For those of you who get the reference, you’ll notice in the picture that there’s an “I Dream of Jeannie” bottle on top of that color TV!)
They also told stories about when my mom was a little girl. She used to go to the barber shop with my grandfather every Saturday. He said, “Saturday was haircut day and there would be a line of men waiting to get their hair cut.” My mom said she used to be so bored waiting, but she wanted to spend the time with her dad. I was surprised that men used to get their hair cut every week!
I asked about my mom’s older sister, Fay, who had died at age four in 1941 after a bout with scarlet fever. The country doctor had given her a blood transfusion without making sure it was the right blood type, and it had killed her. Times have certainly changed. I asked my grandfather if it still made him sad. He said, “If you study about it too much, it gets to you.”
I had forgotten how he had talked until I heard the tape. Studying about it was thinking about it. Trading at the A & P meant shopping at the A & P. That puts me in mind of meant that makes me think of something. He said, Some people can’t hep it which meant some people can’t help it. He grew up on a farm in Tennessee. Maybe it was Southern speak. I was very close to my grandfather and I used to love the way he talked.
They talked about music and about playing old 78 rpm records on a victrola. They talked about listening to the Grand Ole Opry out of Nashville on the radio on Saturday nights. At one point, they got into a discussion about some of their favorite old-time country singers. My grandpa liked Roy Acuff and songs like “Wabash Cannonball” and “The Great Speckled Bird”. They both liked the music of Carl and Pearl Butler from the 1950’s and 1960’s. I wasn’t familiar with the music of the Butler’s so I asked them to sing one of their songs. My Mom began to sing “Don’t Let Me Cross Over” and my grandpa whistled the melody as she sang. It was magical.
And soon after that, they had to head back home an hour away to Elkhart. Our wonderful visit was over, and the tape ended. Some people and times in our lives were so good that we don’t realize just how good they were until they’re gone. We all have people who are no longer here that we miss. I sat there in the silent sun room with their voices echoing in my head and cried.