Family is very important to me; to be more exacting, the concept of family is very important to me.
Somedays it hits me more than others how much I will miss certain aspects of lives long lived. I wish they could be recorded, documented; for posterity, yes, but more so just for MY fading memory - I lie - for my clouded, biased memory. It seems I could make use of a third-party's editorial eye to sort through, categorize and sift someone's entire person into one of those upside-down-pyramid diagrams they always taught us to use for "hard news" stories in journalism classes - the term for which I can't remember now.
"Please put the most admirable attributes in the dek," I'd say. "Leave the messy and vague for the last graf, the one that always gets cut for space anyway..." leaving the hierarchical details of events weighted squarely in his favor.
I wish someone had kept his correspondence as did Valerie for her own T.S. Elliot. I wish there were a "street view" of Chicago intersections in 1931 so I could see not only the photos painstakingly snapped of everyone's favorite little professional performer - the child prodigy, but glean instead some simple, unadulterated context.
But this is sounding less and less like a memoir and more like a subpoena for circumstantial evidence.
All previous hurt aside, it pains me that if a book IS ever written, it would be by the hands another too self-promoting for the product to be of any value to me. I don't want to hear the empty praise and accolades. I just want images, bits and bytes strung together with timetables established before my birth and held up entirely by an underpinning of grace.
Maybe I'll just attempt to play historian for the other branch of my family tree while there's still time.
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