My father, Donald, was only 71 when he passed away. Today he would have celebrated his 100th birthday. Donald Eugene Hill was born at home near the tiny burg of Colburn, Indiana, on October 14, 1915. I saw the house once, abandoned and in the middle of a field; it has since been torn down.
Almost two generations older than me, and deceased since the late 1980s, my dad still connects me to times, lives, and customs taught to him by his parents and grandparents who knew the 19th Century.
There was an abandoned yoke for a draft horse that pulled a plow in back of the barn when I was a kid. I missed the days of my dad using horses to plow and till by only a decade or so. My brothers learned to farm using draft animals.
I may have missed the experiences, but the connections were palpable to me.
These were times when my family, and the culture from which they, came were agrarian. The larger society was in the midst of an industrial revolution but the old ways from many previous centuries still brought food to tables. Territories opened, land rushes drew adventurers and drifters.
Dad saw the coming of the end of the life he knew. Not his own mortality, though he knew that well, but rather the incorporation of the basic production of essential goods necessary to sustaining life into mechanized, impersonal processes removed from nurturance and knowledge.
How did he convey such nuanced information to me? He lived life honestly and he told stories. Boy, oh, boy, did he tell stories. Many people thought him to be an odd duck. And he was. So am I.
He did not give a hoot about what most people thought.
He once roared out during discussion with a local priest for whom he was doing some carpentry, “There is no God but Allah,” while in the middle of the sidewalk in our small, Indiana town. My brother, Roger, witnessed this, and was mortified. We were Christians. I can only imagine that he was demonstrating the belief that one should proclaim one’s beliefs publicly, as in the Islamic call to prayer, in some sort of intense religious discussion with the good Friar. He loved to expound on religious philosophy.
As an agnostic who could, “recite all the begats,” my father was an enigma. His memory had to be photographic, as he could recall anything he ever read and/or learned at the knee of his grandfather, Silas Hill, a Brethren Minister. But at heart my dad was a historian and a logician, not a church-goer. My interests in anthropology and semiotics did not fall very far from the proverbial tree.
He loved to tell stories about finding buried treasure. Some thought his stories were tall tales. But it was easier to find buried loot back when he was a boy, as people did actually bury their precious metal and gold and silver coins to hide them from ne’er do wells in the days before bank deposits were insured. Dad found serious money a couple of times according to my brothers. He literally stumbled over a can of gold coins, on the property just off the road our farm was on, and that financed his first tractor in the 1940s. You see Dad may have told tall tales, but he also listened deeply and analytically to the old men who gathered in the center of the town. Their stories revealed much about who did what where, some of which included who took the whereabouts of where they buried their money to the grave with them.
I cannot document these stories as facts, but I know the stories did not change over time, but they were plausible, and had verifiable elements. And he valued truth and community. He was active as a citizen, He was a volunteer fireman, a founding member of the group in our township. He was an active member of The Farmers Union and the local Democratic Party. Service and truth were important to him. But he also understood the power of telling a story or two.
So, if you would, do me a favor and give a gift in honor of my Dad’s 100th birthday: tell someone a story that you were told as a child. Such is the stuff of legacy.
Happy 100th Daddy.
Mothers and Others, the Mosaic of Women in Our Lives
Mothers
Mothers are probably the most influential people in the world. I am not sure that it was always this way for every culture in the world. In Sparta, mothers gave their sons over to the state to begin training as warriors at age seven. In upper class, historic, European families mothers did not nurse or breastfeed their children, were largely reared by wet nurses, nannies, and governesses , then sent away to school at an early age. In earlier times children older than toddlers essentially were treated as small adults, worked in the fields alongside adults, and had hard lives with no special treatment by mothers and others.
Other things that could have impacted motherly behavior and attitude was the very high rate of infant and child death, a large number of pregnancies, and older siblings providing most of the care for younger siblings. The mother of today was not the mother of yesterday, but we will never really know the full story, as home life and women’s roles were often ignored, diminished or mischaracterized in documents that mentioned them as all.
And The Others
Not all women are mothers, but all women can, theoretically, mentor, influence and love. When you consider the people who have shaped your life in unexpected ways, mentors, role models, heroines from history might all have nourished the spark of an idea within you, or nurtured an aspect of yourself when no one else cared to do so. There is no reason to believe that earlier times were different, although the communities and information bases to which girls had access were quite small compared to the size and number of spheres of interaction in today’s world.
Teachers are probably the most often mentioned persons that have significant influence on children and young adults. Those influences can be recalled fondly by adults who took encouragement from the attention and guidance of someone who took the time to help, instruct, or just talk to them when they were children in a way or at a time that was critical in their lives.
Surrogate grandmothers and neighbor ladies are undervalued in their influence. The women who offer the alternative views to the status quo, eccentrics, old maids, crazy cat ladies, pigeon feeders, and other women who have born labels such as witches, the outliers to so-called appropriate society hold a wealth of knowledge to which mainstream society would prefer go away or be suppressed. These are the secrets of folk medicine, underground railways, speakers of truth to power, and of life based on what really happens when you break the rules.
Nearly forgotten family women, the women behind the old lockets, letters, and handkerchieves tied with ribbons in boxes and attics, can capture our imaginations with the small details remembered through decades and even centuries passed. These women, known perhaps only by first names and husbands’ family names become iconic nails in the wall of a hallway of memories and stories through which we walk when we need to gather up and draw upon the meanings we may have layered over them and which we cannot find among our current experiences. They allow us to claim family or genetic origins for the strength, inspiration, and traits we need to summon up in ourselves.
The image below is of Gene Stratton-Porter. She was one of the early amateur science writers and photographers who employed ethological methods unheard of in the scientific literature until half a century later when Jane Goodall made time-intensive, nonaggressive acclimation standard procedure in her studies of chimpanzees.
Women involved in natural sciences, travel, and documentary production often received sparks of inspiration from women like Goodall and Gene Stratton-Porter. Rachel Carson drew inspiration from Gene Stratton-Porter’s best selling fiction, such as Song of the Cardinal, the method through which Porter financed her amateur science publications. These oft unknown influences and role-models shapes the behavior of women at the very highest levels of societal organization.
There are so many ways that women through time support those women who come after them. We only know the stories of some of these women. Many stories of influence just are not preserved. It is not only good, it is world-changing when we acknowledge our inspirational foremothers.