Here’s a teaser:

He had called Mom into his office to tell her in person the results of the tests. He explained carefully and clearly, going over every option in detail, though there were, essentially, none. No hope. It took about ten minutes to get through it all, and then he stopped talking.

Mom sat quietly looking down at the floor, very still. She sat there without speaking for what, in other circumstances, would be too long. Just as the silence was becoming uncomfortable, she looked up and said to him:
“Are you telling me I shouldn’t buy any green bananas?”

Follow this link for the full story on Time Goes By.

About Ronnie: After years of research into what life would be like as she aged, Ronnie found a lot of bad news. As a reaction, she created a blog and started writing about her own experience aging. Since launching “Time Goes By” in 2003, she has staked out a solid spot in the blogosphere, garnering a following of thousands of visitors per day. No topic is taboo, and as a former TV and radio producer, her content is well-researched and well-written. She moved from Greenwich Village to Lake Oswego, Oregon in 2010.

Melissa: Daddy…let’s open up the presents, ok? Let’s open up your present.
Father: Oh that’s right, my present, but don’t you think we should open yours first?

I sat down on my pale green bedspread, the one I bought at age 14 to match the flowered wallpaper. The walls of this room resemble a time capsule from 1999—cheeky postcards are stuck to the closet, buttons from high school Model Congress hang on a cord, and a yellowing newspaper clipping of Good Will Hunting still occupies a place of honor above my dresser. Middle school pictures are pinned to a corkboard. And here the voices of even farther away, 25 plus years ago, drifted up from the cassette player as clearly as if they were coming from the next room.

Father: Hey, I have something here too, here let me see. Oh look what I have! Chocolates.
Melissa: Oh can I have this one?
Father: Yeah sure, these are presents from Santa
Mother enters
Melissa: You know what? Dad got chocolates in his stocking, and I took one because he was sharing his chocolates.

It was Christmas Day, probably 1986, when I was 3 years old. My parents had set up a tape recorder somewhere in the living room, to simply capture everything that went on that morning—from my gleeful tearing of wrapping paper, to their muffled disagreements, to the fetching of apple juice for their little girl. At some point, my grandmother entered the room, settling in to comment laconically from the corner. I was euphoric about the presents, ecstatic at the prospect of getting the Wrinkles dog or the Popples stuffed animal I wanted.

And the 20-something year old me, alone in my old bedroom, drank it all in. Without this cassette, I could never imagine this world existing. My parents separated when I was four years old, and I have no memory of them in the same room together.

Melissa: Mommy, I wonder what’s in this big package?
Mother: I don’t know about this one.
Melissa: It must be my Popples, yes it’s my Popples, Popples, Popples!!
Mother: You got it! You got your Popples!
Father: That’s expensive, isn’t it?
Melissa: No, no, we didn’t buy it, Santa Claus gave it to me.
Mother: That’s because you’re such a good girl.
Melissa: Santa gave it to me so I could pop it in. Know why I wanted that Popple?
Mother: Why?
Melissa: Because I saw a Popple on TV, and I decided to get one, but I couldn’t buy one, so I decided to wait for Christmas…

My parents met in Mexico in 1981, where my father lived and my mother was on vacation. Shortly afterwards, my mother quit her job in New York City and moved down to Mexico to be with my father. When I was four months old, they got in a worn blue Nissan and drove for nine days from Mexico City back to New York. My father worked as stock broker, in real estate, a few other things. My mother stayed home with me. When my parents separated, my father moved back to his home country. We’ve exchanged phone calls and emails over the years, and I’ve visited Mexico three times. But other than that—I don’t know much about my father, or my parents’ relationship, at all.

Mother: Show Daddy your fashion
Father: What else did I miss? Ooh, let me see. What a beautiful thing!
Mother: That’s her fashion paint smock. (Holding up a stuffed dog) Look—hi! It says, “Mucho gusto” Is this a Spanish dog, can he speak Spanish?
Melissa: No.
Father: He doesn’t?
Melissa: No no no he doesn’t. He’s a doggy. Doggies say woof woof.
Father: That’s so pretty, let me see it
Mother: She wants to paint right now. You want to stop opening your presents?
Father: No I think we better continue with the presents….

Sitting in my room that night, I felt like I had received a gift: to eavesdrop across time, to listen in across the chasm of years. Few people get the experience of scooping up a moment of family history and plopping it down in the present; of reliving what’s gone. I could be an invisible observer to my life: how my mother spoke to my father, and how he rejoined; how I pranced at their feet, and sometimes intervened. It was an incredible, fortuitous gift I could never have accessed any other way. Pure voices have a way of bridging time and space the when pictures never can. Images represent what once was. Audio recreates.

Mother: Merry Christmas Melissa! Happy New Year to you!
Melissa: Happy New Year to you, Merry Christmas! Now you feed her her bone…and you
say nice nice…

Story from Melissa Galvez, Boston-based radio producer. web: http://melissagalvez.com/  twitter: @melissamgalvez

This evening, as I walked home from work, I noticed a small book propped up again someone’s fence. It was leather-bound, and the late evening sun caught its golden embossing. It was a special book. I picked it up and tilted it slightly to read the spine: Roget’s Thesaurus. On the copyright page, I learned it had been published in 1946 by Pocket Books. It felt good in the palm, so I took it. Sitting on the bus, I began flipping pages.

Words. They can be like honey.

The pages did not proceed in single-file order, instead they denoted entry numbers. I found myself reading entries “113-117,” which listed synonyms related to “Abstract Relations.”

114. [Estimation, measurement, and record of time] CHRO-

NOMETRY. –N. Chronometry, chronology,  horology.

          almanac, calendar; register, registry; chronicle, annals, journal, diary.

          timekeeper, clock, watch, repeater; chronometer, timepiece; dial, sundial, hourglass.

And then a little farther down…

116. PRIORITY – N. priority, predecessor, precedence, preexistence; precursor, antecedent, forerunner; the past, etc. 122. V. precede, come before; pre-exist, forerun; go before, lead, head; presage, herald, usher in, introduce, announce.

It was “usher in, introduce, announce” that got me. Very often in our work at StoryKeep, families come to us because they want to record the “old stories.” They want to document their father’s past, their mother’s roots. They want to capture anecdotes that tell something about who they are and where they come from. I love all of this, the nostalgia and the romance. But tonight, I remembered something I already knew. I remembered how our families don’t just root us in the past, they “usher” us in. Our grandparents’ lives are equally, and perhaps more powerful, because they introduce us, they announce us, they make a path.

A few months ago, I was in the midst of conducting a series of recording sessions with a ninety-four year-old man. As he said during our first meeting together, “You know what that means, it means I’m old.” Over the course of a few months, I also conducted recording sessions with his children. I learned about their careers and a few details of each of their lives. Every last one of them was well accomplished and socially at ease. This man had been their forerunner. I learned from his grandson that this man had been one of the first Jewish law students at Harvard. Opening a yearbook from 1939, his daughter read aloud some statistics: “There were twelve Hebrews,” and then later she noted, “…and there were over 200 Episcopalians.”

Unfortunately, the gentleman passed away before our delivering of his “Audio Life Chronicle.”

117. POSTERIORITY. –N. posteriority; succession, sequence;

following, continuance, prolongation; futurity, future; successor; sequel, etc 65; remainder.

Are we the “futurity” of our forerunners? I think so. We are their continuance. We are their better sequel, we hope. We come in sequence, following and remaining. We are not, as the Thesaurus entry title would have us believe, “Abstract Relations.” That’s the antonym. We are concrete, actual, real.

On most Wednesdays, I’m in my office editing, or in someone’s home conducting an interview for StoryKeep. It was good to be outside with the birds for a change. As I drank in the sunshine, I pointed my microphone at Jane Alcon, the President of the Tesla Science Center. She and Mary Daum, the Treasurer, talked about their organization’s efforts.  As we chatted, we turned our attention to the majestic brick building, hidden behind a tall chain-linked fence. Crawling ivy covered most everything. Like a woman’s greying hair, mossy green patches announced the building’s age.

I loved being with Jane and Mary. They were down-to-earth, yet entirely sophisticated. Their passion was palatable and contagious. They’ve been working to save Tesla’s laboratory for over 17 years. Can I get a “woo-rah-rah”?

Nearing the end of our interview, Jane emphasized how much Nikola Tesla’s tenacity-of-spirit inspires her work:

“This is a lesson in tenacity. I think that everybody who has a dream should consider that they shouldn’t give up, that you never know if the next person you reach out to will be the one who can help you…I know that Tesla was very tenacious in what tried to do. I think we’re taking inspiration from him and that, and we hope that he’ll inspire other people as well – the inventors and the scientists and the tinkerers who may come up with some of the solutions for today’s problems.”

• To learn more about the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, click here.
• To listen to NPR’s Science Desk story the Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, click here.
• To have StoryKeep record your organization’s story, be in touch! jamie@storykeep.org

In 2011, he wrote a five-part series about these incredible report cards for Slate. I recommend reading the articles, but definitely check out his blog. It’s the juicy stuff, the video-enhanced, photo-rich backstory that will make your eyes widen, and for some of you, inspire story-full documentation.