Of Our Inheritance

My grandmother passed away about a year ago. Though a sad event, it sparked in me a chain reaction of thought which I hope to convey here. About six months after her passing I was watching a PBS documentary about the Dust Bowl, I was shocked at how hard life was for the poor individual who by fate or misfortune, happened to live in Oklahoma during those years. Then, while mentally soaking in this bygone era, with all it's hardship and misery, old memories of conversations I had with my parents resurfaced and I was reminded that My grandmother was raised in Oklahoma during those same years.

I got on the phone and called my grandfather (he now lives alone in suburban Seattle). I asked him if grandma had lived through the dust bowl. He said yes. I then asked what it was like, what stories did she tell? It was (sadly) the first time I remember being truly curious about her life. His answers surprised me. He didn’t have much to say about it. Just a few brief generalizations about how hard it was, generalizations that were really no different than what I had just seen on PBS. He didn’t seem to want to talk about it. Now, before I go any further let me be clear, I don’t know why my grandfather didn’t seem to want to talk about the dust bowl. It may be he was in the middle of something and wanted to hang up the phone, or that he didn’t want to speak too much of events he himself didn’t live through, and whose stories, told by my grandmother, have begun fading from his memory. But at that moment I believed the reason he didn’t have much to say was that, she, never had much to say. That it was a chapter in her life she would rather forget. And maybe, it was suppressed to the point that she had forgotten it, and therefore never said much about it to my grandfather. It was too painful to recall, too raw in the telling, and best left deep in the dusty corners of a faint and distant past.

Now, whether or not she ever felt that way about that part of her childhood is irrelevant for the purposes of this post, It’s included here not because it’s what she went through, but because it’s what I perceived her experience to be at the moment I hung up the phone with my Grandfather. And it led me to the next link in my chain of thoughts. And that link is this; I don’t know anything about my grandparents.

All my life I’ve seen my grandparents through the lense of a grandchild. Through that lense, they were endlessly kind, endlessly happy, and seemed to have an endless supply of candy. It was a very childish and one sided relationship, with them doing all the giving, and my greedy hand always turned up looking for more. I didn't comprehend that those smiling faces had lived through the Great Depression, or that they had known the hardships of war. I didn’t, and still don’t, know many of the joy’s and sorrows they've lived through.

There's a scene in the movie "The Fellowship of the Ring" where two of the heroes of the tale, Frodo & Sam, are traveling across country and come across a traveling body of elves. The Elves were a Godlike race, a sort of humanity perfected. They were immortal, sang beautiful songs, were themselves beautiful, and yet were skilled wariers , and most importantly, carried with them all the knowledge and history of their world. Frodo & Sam don't confront them, they stand watching the light that emanates from them and listening to the melodic songs they sing as they pass. Sam turns to Frodo and asks where they're going", Frodo replies by telling him they are leaving the Earth, never to return. Sams response is, to me, poetic. He says simply "I don't know why, but it makes me sad". My grandparents, and the generation they represent, carry with them wisdom and experience. They passed through hard times, came through them stronger, and made the world better. But one by one they, like the Elves of Tolkien's books, are leaving the Earth, and like Sam, it makes me sad. But unlike Sam, I do know why. It makes me sad because I never took the time to know them (and learn from the wisdom they carry). And It's quickly becoming too late to ask them.

This is the generation that took us from Depression, through war, into boom times, and ultimately, to the moon. They built so much of the nation I inhabit, the highways, the great public works, the buildings and institutions. So much of the world I take for granted came either from them, or from the generations before them.

I didn’t build any of this. I didn’t build the New York skyline, or the Golden Gate Bridge. I didn’t build Chicago’s Miracle Mile, New Orleans’ French Quarter, or Boston’s Harbor. I didn’t contribute in any way to the creation of the great Hollywood studios, nor to our Nations Universities, nor to our unique form of government. None of it is my own creation. This peaceful, free, creative world is an inheritance given to me by a people I now consider to be more capable, more industrious, and more wise than my own generation. I see myself, and my generation, as the unruly grandchildren of a wealthy family, incapable of maintaining the family fortune and destined to squander it all into oblivion. We don’t have, nor do we seem to even want to have, the work ethic, nor wisdom required to maintain such an inheritance. Our nations infrastructure is crumbling all around us, we’re not maintaining the manor. We never passed through the hard times they did, we were never humbled like they were, and as a consequence, we never gained the wisdom that comes with such experience.

I don’t want to squander my inheritance. I want to build on it, and improve it, I want to carry the torch of history forward in a positive way. But I am incapable of maintaining a system I don’t comprehend. And I feel like I don’t really even know what it is I’ve inherited.

I said before that I don’t know anything about my grandparents. Well, now I'll take that a step further and say that just as I see my grandparents through the narrow lense of a child, I now believe I see the world, not as it is, but through a narrow lense. I don’t know what led us to the world I inherit today. I don’t know what great thoughts, what wisdom took us from cave man, to modern man. How did we get here? What kind of people did this? What did they know? What was their character like? Or does their character even matter?

The intention of this Blog is to attempt to answer those questions. Until I understand how and why we got here, I won't know what to do to help keep us here. To keep us from decline, to keep us from losing our inheritance, and hopefully, to continue making forward progress.

The people whose wisdom and morals made the world what it is are mostly dead. They, like Tolkien's Elves, have left the Earth forever. But, unlike the Elves, many of them left the wisdom they carried with them behind. They wrote their thought down on objects that they knew would outlast them. The more valuable part of the Inheritance they’ve given us is not found in the monuments and institutions they left behind (although they’re greatly appreciated) But in the books they’ve left us. They are the “how to” manuals that will guide us through life, they are the blueprints for what we’ve inherited, and even if all we have were lost, they would tell us how to build it all back up again.

"Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations." Henry David Thoreau

Books, or rather what they contain, are our inheritance.