#0032 | memory’s embers
Submitted by Emma in Norwich, United Kingdom.
Here’s Emma’s story:
“My mum told me this story recently about her parents. Her father was a fiercely intelligent, Cambridge graduate who drank and smoked too much and could not get a job through The “Great” Depression. Her mother was a wealthy daughter of colonial émigrés. Her mother was a socialite, on the board of every club and society, always holding parties. Her mother resented her father for not being able to keep them in the style she had been accustomed to. She was always telling him off, which made him more depressed and caused him to drink more.
The one thing he loved to do was to write and he used to write stories for my mum and her sister. He wrote a little series of books for them about some Italian children who lived in the mountains. My mum and her sister loved these books and would listen to their father reading them every night and look at the lovely pictures he had drawn so carefully.
Then one day my mum’s mother saw them all happily listening to the stories and she got angry. My grandmother took all the storybooks that her father had taken years to write and she burnt them all so they were utterly destroyed. My mum and her sister cried and cried and shouted at their mother. Her father drunk even more.
He never re-wrote the stories and they are, as such, lost forever (except for the story of how they got lost).”
6 folks have left comments on this post
This is a very sad story. I lost a box of books in the mail once and that was frustrating enough, but all those handmade stories! Argh!
When I was eight, in the Third Grade, I had been writing a series of short stories over the last couple of years. I kept them all in one folder and was very proud of them. Once, a teacher asked to borrow them to make copies and show other students. I’m pretty sure she gave them back, but I was never able to find them again. I looked and looked all over my house and for years, everytime I would see a blue folder, my heart would rise in my chest and I would hope that they had resurfaced.
Not quite as emotionally scarring, but I do tend to drink more now than I did then. But that might just be an age thing.
In my freshman year of art school, one of my professors took drawings from people to show as examples to other students. He took a few of my best ones, and when I tried to say something about it he said – “This is your freshman year, you’re going to get much better and won’t miss them.” I let him take them for fear of a bad grade, and regretted it ever since. Damn you Doug Wirls!
What I really like about this Haiku is the universality of the message. It’s one of the best so far.
All this lost creative stuff is no good at all: Josh’s writing, Nina’s art works and my grandad’s stories. I wonder what the odds are on one day in some future time someone else producing the same things again…just hope they don’t get lost that time…
As for the lost books that Kaitlyn wrote about well that’s annoying too: we lost loads of books to total mould when we had a flat in London (these old 1800s English houses are riddled with damp!).
Someone deleted a bunch of my blog……
eh…….
That’s so sad, what a bad woman.
This reminds me of my grandfather’s writing, and makes me appreciate that I was able to save a bunch of it. My grandad wrote all the time – he wrote a book praising Reagan (THAT, I never read) and he wrote us children’s stories and whimsical letters for every birthday and holiday. I never appreciated them at the time but I still saved them for some reason…I think they’re part of the reason I became a writer.