Learn the New, Respect the Old

At thanksgiving this year, somewhere between turkey and pie, I had a chance to listen to the stories of my elders.  My Granny had been newly introduced to someone’s great uncle, and the two of them began sharing stories about what it was like to grow up in the fifties.  I had already heard Granny’s stories about how she would sew everything her family wore, but the gentleman she was speaking to proved to have a wealth of new stories.  He told us about the cave they used as a cellar half a mile away from home, and how they stored watermelons in oatmeal to keep them fresh as the day they were picked all winter long.

I listened with rapture as the two of them spoke.  No doubt some of the others were bored out of their minds, licking their already clean plates and starting hunting parties in search of dessert.  Some of them grumbled about the “back in the day” discussion.  Some of them ignored it entirely.  But I remained at the table to listen to these two old people talk, learning tidbits of wisdom from their previous years.

Ninety percent of what I leaned will never be useful.  I can hardly fit a watermelon in my fridge, let alone store a barrel of oats to pack it in.  But these pieces of knowledge, if not shared with a younger generation, will die out.  Perhaps later a scientist will discover the chemical compound Rolledoatium and write vast scientific essays about its uses in preserving fruits with high water content.  Perhaps they won't.  And it would certainly be easier to remember these facts than attempt to discover them all on our own.

There’s an amazing danger of losing these old anecdotes and knowledge to the void of death if we refuse to record them.  Gone are the days of Bible times when a priest could recite the Old Testament by memory.  But I don’t speak with anguish of “times gone by”:  our generation has never developed that recall because we have technology to remember things for us.  We don’t remember things because, in reality, we don’t have to anymore.  We don’t have to know Jimmy McFlaren’s phone number to contact him, because that information is cradled safely within the millions of megabytes we hold in our pocket.  But to a computer, there is only one difference between a phone number, a Facebook status, or a piece of wisdom from a great uncle: a human decided that this was a piece of information worth saving or sharing.

My thanksgiving education wasn’t over yet, though.  I was stunned to discover how many members of my supposedly tech savvy family still lived at pre-Windows 7 levels.  “XP is running just fine for me, and it has for four or five years now,” said my uncle.  “Until I have a program that just refuses to work for me, I don’t see a point in updating.”  Somehow, I had assumed that my extended family operated on the same level of technology that I did.  Realizing they didn’t further drove the previous point home: if we, the computer literate, do not or will not record the stories of the past in the channels of technology we possess, these stories will be lost to the void.  In that sense, it is our duty to seek out the tales and wisdom of those less able than ourselves in order to preserve that knowledge for the future.