[2021-02-06] Questions and stories
On today's daily call with my mom, I decided to ask her some questions from my list of questions. Not much changes from day to day, so posing questions beyond What did you do today? is a great way to stimulate conversation.
At 82, my mom is still very sharp and has an incredible memory. You'd think that at my age, 54, I'd already know all my mom's stories, but I don't, as I was reminded this afternoon.
I scrolled through my questions and randomly stopped at this one: Chocolate or caramel? I knew the answer to the first part of the question—my mom is not a huge lover of chocolate—but I wasn't sure about the second. "I do like caramel," she acknowledged. OK, that was an easy question to start with.
The next question was this: Something your mother often says or said? My mom couldn't think of anything in particular that her mom often said, but I could think of a few things that my mom frequently uttered when we were kids: When we were underfoot: "Go play outside." When we were grumpy: "You're tired; go to bed." And when we were pouting: "If the wind changes, your face will stay that way." This made us both laugh. My mom recalled that our bedtime as kids was 8:30. She recounted that on one occasion, one of her kids whispered to another, "It's 20 to 9." They must have thought that they had really gotten away with something. My mom, not realizing the time, heard the exchange and promptly sent the kids to bed.
The next question was Your strangest possession? "How about your butter churn?" I suggested. My mom has a very old butter churn with a handle that allowed the user to rock the large crock and thereby turn cream into butter. That answer led to my mom's telling me about the type of farming my family did. I grew up thinking that my family had exclusively raised pigs, but learned today that they had started with dairy cows. My mom shared that they would sell their milk to the cheese factory in Boyd's Settlement, located about 2 kilometres from our farm in what was then Lanark Township. Once milk quotas were introduced, my family switched to raising beef cows and later converted to raising pigs. This was all new to me and absolutely fascinating.
The final question was Your favourite spectator sport? My mom mentioned soccer and football. "When we lived on Fourth Avenue," she told me, "we used to get into the Ottawa Rough Riders games for free at half time." I hadn't realized that my mom had lived in the Glebe, having never asked her where precisely in Ottawa she and my father had lived before they bought the farm. They originally lived with my grandmother (a widow by then) and my mom's oldest and youngest brothers. They lived together in an apartment on St. Patrick's Street and later on the second and third floor of a house on Fourth Avenue until my parents and two oldest siblings moved to the farm in 1960. My mom worked at Bell Canada as a switchboard operator. I asked her how she got to work. "The bus?" I ventured. "No," my mom replied. "I took the streetcar." My mom also shared a cute story. When she lived with her mom, she would tell her firstborn, who would have been under the age of two, "Go see your granny." He would totter off to his grandmother's part of the apartment. After a while, my grandmother would say, "Go see your mommy."
This turned out to be a lovely conversation. Questions of almost any kind are like a key that unlocks old memories and stories. You never know what interesting tidbit of information will emerge after a question is posed at random.
I recognize how lucky I am to still have my mom in my life. Perhaps she feels the same way about me since my diagnosis with ovarian cancer. We didn't used to talk every day on the phone, but the combination of COVID and cancer has led us to this routine, and I'm glad of it.
It's so easy to take our loved ones for granted—to assume that they'll be there tomorrow, that they'll be available to answer our questions, and that they'll have the mental capacity to remember their stories when we do ask them.
Don't wait. If you've been meaning to talk to a loved one—a grandparent, a parent, an aunt, an uncle, a sibling, a cousin, a friend—make a point to do so. Start a routine, such as a daily call (if time permits), a weekly chat, a family Zoom, an email exchange. Record the conversation, if your loved one is comfortable, or do as I did today: jot down some notes after the discussion. You could take my questions or a list such as the one published by the National Caregiving Foundation and ask your loved one to write down their answers or ask younger family members to gather memories from older family members. Or you could simply enjoy the conversation and record the memory in your heart.
