Lenten Librarian: Day Three

Last night I spent some time reviewing two of my sources.  The first was in an effort to address my fourth research question (Q4): Am I still interested in the things I used to love?  I looked at a transcript of a recording I made of my grandmother.  

This is my grandmother's
high school yearbook picture.

Ruth Murphy a.k.a. Toots, died in the spring of 2010.  She was ninety-three years old.  She spent the last year of her life in bed, no TV, no books.  She told herself stories, invented some fictions that she thought were real, and recalled the details of her life.  During the year or two preceding the health issues that landed her in bed, I had some sense that our time together was limited, and I made an attempt to be part of her efforts to document her life.  She had started this project long ago, writing snippets and remembrances in spiral notebooks and journals that were scattered across the shelves in her den.  I asked if she would let me record her and she said yes.  


Toots was a natural storyteller.  When I was a kid, she made up bedtime stories about George, an elephant who lived in the jungle with his tiger friend Ralph.  For exercise in the snowy wintertime, she walked circles around her huge basement, inventing stories of a little girl living on the prairie.  She recited "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes form memory, shedding tears every time she spoke the beautiful words that end that tragic story.  I wanted to capture her storyteller's voice, and so I asked her questions about her childhood, her father's death, living above a funeral home, getting through the Depression, life during rationing, the end of WWII, and becoming a mother.  I wish I had had more time.

Last night I skimmed through a transcript of those recordings and it took about two seconds for me to answer my research question.  Yes, I am still interested.  I do want to write her story.  She asked me to once, when I was visiting her during the last months of her life.  I told her I would.  I also told her she would have made a brilliant librarian.  

Even more than her transcript, it is this that makes me sure I want to pursue this project.  I wrote it five months after she died (November 2, 2010 - thank you GoogleDrive for recording the date!).

Dear Toots,

We are more alike than I thought.  I eat cheese and crackers all the time, as my preferred food.  I love candied nuts.  I am not always kind to the people I love.  I like to watch the shows I know well over and over again.  I tell myself stories.

I miss you.

It's obvious to me that I saw something in all of those photos, notes, journals, and letters she gave me that drove home how much of my self came from her. Somewhere in the bins at home, there's a picture of Toots' mother that looks exactly like me. Part of me is in her story, I'm sure of it. To research myself, I need to research Toots as well.

I'm a young teacher here, and yes, my hair is dyed black.

I also have a lead on Research Question One (Q1): What aspects of my personality have changed? Actually, this also applies to Q4 (see how a good research process leads to connections?). I started to review my old teaching blog, and it turns out that for the eleven years I taught in public schools I was doing something very deliberate. I was teaching for social justice. Of course I was! Somehow I have lost track of that part of myself. I need to dig in more to make sense of this, but my research plan now includes an exploration of what that means and whether I still do it.

Finally, I must add a research question. Number Five: What is the role of music in my life and what do I want its role to be? These days I listen to a lot of music that I think will appeal to my kid. Or music that will soothe him. Or music that he'll dance to. It used to be that there was always music playing in my life: in the car, in my house, through my headphones while I cleaned, or cooked, or wrote. Not so much these days. These days I long for silence. So this question is an important one. I've had a lot of music education, and I love so many kinds of music. I don't want to lose touch with that.

I've played a lot of instruments (5, I think) starting with violin.

Here are some next steps for my research: 

continue looking over the material about Toots

continue looking at the teaching blog to think about social justice teaching

look at music collection to see what's what

oh, and maybe cook some Indian food (there's no hurry; I have forty days!)