Frank de Caro - Stories of Our Lives

2013 by Frank de Caro

Published by Utah State University Press

An imprint of University Press of Colorado

5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C

Boulder, Colorado 80303

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State Colorado University.

ISBN: 978-0-87421-893-0 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-87421-894-7 (e-book)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.481992

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

De Caro, F. A., 1943

Stories of our lives : memory, history, narrative / Frank de Caro.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-87421-893-0 (pbk.) ISBN 978-0-87421-894-7 (e-book)

1. De Caro, F. A., 1943 2. FolkloristsUnited StatesBiography. 3. FolkloreUnited States. 4. United StatesSocial life and customs. I. Title.

GR55.D4A3 2013

398.092dc23

[B]

2013019962

Acknowledgments

P ART OF CHAPTER 11 APPEARED PREVIOUSLY, IN SOMEWHAT different form, in the Louisiana Folklore Miscellany (volumes 1617, 2008). And as of this writing material from is due to appear in Western Folklore. My thanks to these publications for their interest.

A number of people have read this book in an earlier draft and kindly offered additions and suggestions and I thank them all: Beatrice Palmer, Barbara Gray, Jack Mulvehill, Rosan Jordan, Kevin Mulvehill, Carl Patrick, Mary Jane Mulvehill, Margo Culley, Urban S. Mulvehill Jr., John McAlevey, and Kathleen Gray. Laura Clapp kindly sent me some of her stories.

At Utah State University Press John Alley encouraged this book at an early stage and Michael Spooner and Karli Fish gave close attention to the project. At the University Press of Colorado, my thanks go to managing editor Laura Furney and marketing manager Beth Svinarich for their fine handling of the book, and to copy editor Diane Bush for providing such excellent editing.

Be Sure to Read This First

A Preface

With individual stories, the statistics become people.

Neil Gaiman, American Gods

I am ambivalent about memoirs because of what I have learned about memory. Yet I also realize that we are constantly constructing our memoirs, polishing and tweaking our life stories, making order out of randomness every time we recount the events of the day.

Laura Lippman, Shut Up, Memory

T HIS BOOK IS PARTLY A MEMOIR, BUT A memoir with a difference and a premise: that our life memory is informed by and greatly influenced by the oral stories that we tell or have told about our lives and the stories others have told us about their lives or the past or the nature of culture and the world. Such stories may coexist with more generalized memories and documentary sources, like letters and diaries, that help us to remember or reformulate our pasts. But certainly the stories we tell and listen to play an integral role in constructing our temporal selves. This premise may be self-evidentespecially to folklorists, who are aware of the social importance of personal narratives, family saga, and communal legendsbut seldom has it been demonstrated for individual lives.

This book, then, in part attempts to demonstrate and use some of my own life memories and stories as specimens to suggest the applicability of the premise. If all memoir is to some degree a self-indulgence, I further indulge myself as a folklorist by calling attention to the centrality of oral narration in my own life. Thus, in addition to providing the types of recollections found in all memoirs, this book includes my thoughts on the meanings of certain stories to my life and my sense of self. This admittedly makes for an odd sort of book.

This memoir relies heavily on bits and pieces of oral history and oral narratives, accounts of past events that were passed on to me, accounts that I have passed along to others, and most particularly, storiesaccounts of the past that have crystallized into finished narratives. In the case of this memoir, however, I seek to specifically call attention to such narratives and emphasize their significance in creating personal records of our lives.

The oral stories that come to usin conversations and special recountings by relatives or friends, whether in passing or specially recalledhave considerable power to convey knowledge and meaning. I doubt that most of us are consciously aware of this power when we first begin to hear such stories, usually quite early in life. I know that I wasnt. Yet that power is there. Because stories make events cohere into some sort of plot, because stories are often repeated so that their message is emphasized again and again, and because stories often speak of happenings somehow regarded as special, they take what might be the mundane facts of life and turn them into something transcendent. A story tells us: here is something significant, something worth remembering, something to internalize. A story calls attention to some aspect of memory that we and others think important to never forget. In this book I talk about the stories that are part of my personal memory and the memories of other people I have known and consider what they are telling me about my personal worldview and the worldview of those around me, about what I have been told about and have noticed about existence and the world and my passage through it. I mostly have no recordings of the stories Ive heard or told and simply re-create them on the page, though in a few cases I format transcriptions of recordings as block quotations (without quotation marks).

When I say that I re-create stories, I mean more than one thing. I occasionally reproduce a storydelinated by quotation marksin what I imagine to be something like the language in which I or someone else might tell it. In most cases, however, I simply work the story into my larger text, hoping that I have retained something of the dramatic quality of oral narration (though not all told stories are necessarily dramatic). When I write here of something being a story or of some incident having become a story for me, I mean that this narrative is a tale I have told or that someone else has toldthat it is a part of my or someones oral repertoire. Of course, other elements of this memoir are based on bits and pieces of oral history, which are perhaps stories in utero. Certainly the family history that I recount consists not merely of well-formed stories but is also drawn from other pieces of family oral history.

What I do here, then, is also explain why particular stories might be important to me (what they seem to say), although readers of this book may come up with their own explanations and though my explanations may very much be partial ones. In the case of stories which are not mine alonelegends and family saga, certainlymy perspectives may be quite different from those of other people who share the stories; and my versions will doubtlessly be different from theirs in greater or smaller ways.