4/52 - Archives Should Also Include the Everyday Things

As I noted in a few previous posts, both Mary Glenn and I recently read/listened to Ann Patchett’s wonderful collection of essays, “These Precious Days.” The title essay (which originally appeared in Harper’s) is her recounting of three interconnected stories: 1) a serendipitous connection with Tom Hanks (which turns out to be the least important story); 2) life during the COVID pandemic; and 3) her friendship with Tom’s personal assistant, a fascinating woman named Sooki. I won’t go into details and be a spoiler -- just buy the book! -- but it’s a beautiful story.

The story got me thinking about our own experiences during the pandemic, an experience that we all thought we would “never forget.” In our case -- like that in “These Precious Days” -- the COVID story was interwoven with the story of the decline of a loved one (my mom). 

Of course, we know the headline events from these interwoven stories. My mom had a knee replacement on January 2, 2020. Initially, everything seemed to be going terrifically. By mid January, though, my mom was insistent that something wasn’t quite right (although we all stupidly kept saying it was just in her head). Of course (like many things Sal), she was right. By the end of January, it was clear that the bone beneath the knee had cracked, and another surgery was needed. Pretty heavy sledding for an 89 year old, particularly one used to always being in control.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. By the end of March, her independent living complex was in lockdown, with no external visitors allowed. A few weeks later, everyone in the complex was quarantined in their individual apartments. Needless to say, all of the physical therapy planned back in January (which my mom was never enthusiastic about anyway) became somewhat of a haphazard affair. All of this set the stage for a series of stair step declines over the subsequent three years.

That isn’t the point of this post, although I do think I will be coming back to this chronology in the next few months. The point of this post is how little we all remember clearly about this time. Was the time we tried to bring Sal to our house and have her live with us in April? May? June? No idea. Ditto the sequence of contracted health care aides we engaged during this period to keep things afloat in an ersatz assisted living scheme. Who were they again? And when did Sal stage her rebellion against the Occupational Therapy profession? “I don’t need anyone to tell me how to hang things in my closet. I’ve been doing it for 80 years. I think they must all go to specialized schools to learn that patronizing voice they use.”

All of these memories are a huge jumble, and becoming even more jumbled with the passage of time.

As someone who dabbles in family history, there are two major resources I rely on to get a sense of what life was like in the past. First, the volumes of document archives that have been opened up to the world via the application of OCR and AI to old paper based records. It was only a few years ago that you needed to go to some library or archive somewhere, crank up some unreliable Soundex index, and then crank through volumes of microfilm to find some tidbit that would provide a clue about what life was like in the past. Now, just turn on the computer at home.

The other resource is the “stuff” that one finds in random boxes, often boxes that you’ve “inherited” from a house you helped clear out -- things like papers, letters, photos, journals, yearbooks, newspaper clippings, and the like. These are not formal archives that document major events, but often miscellaneous artifacts that remain of a life long after it was lived. Again, mostly paper-based stuff. Not indexed at all, but with enough patience one can just rummage through it. Everyday life preserved.

When we went through my in-laws house (the house where they lived their entire married life). We came upon boxes and boxes and bags and bags of stuff. I am convinced that the reason that Kodak went belly up is because my mother-in-law stopped taking pictures. Pictures EVERYWHERE. At one point we came across a huge locked chest. We assumed that this would finally be where we found the missing family jewels, hidden away long ago from the yankees, or perhaps a yellowed stock certificate for the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. But once we got a crow bar and pried open the chest, alas just more pictures.

We also found boxes and boxes of letters. There were many sent to Nancy during WW2. I even managed to track down a few of the senders and forward the copies to them. And we discovered that Nancy’s mother was a prolific diarist, and managed to save ten daily journals she wrote from about 1930 to 1940.

But what about now? Pictures, emails, and text messages are nothing physical, just collections of ones and zeroes stored in the cloud. In the records profession we constantly tell everyone to be careful what they put on-line, because “electrons live forever.” But from a family history perspective, do we REALLY think they do? 

Why is it that I persist in periodically printing out photo books, despite the fact that all of these photos and tens of thousands more exist in Google-Land? I am guessing it’s because in my heart of hearts I don’t really believe that 100 years from now someone will be able to “discover” a box of digital stuff, rummage around in it, and come to any reasonable conclusion about what our lives were like.

It bothers me that as intense as the COVID/Sal-decline period felt, the memories are already fading. And unlike 100 years ago, there will be no letters to be discovered at some point in the future to reconstruct this time. As I tried to think about where this history might be floating around, and after a bit it occurred to me that a pretty good archive did exist, on Facebook Messenger. 

Probably like many families, my siblings and I have a “chain” we use to keep connected and informed. If you look at one of these threads, you can scroll back through and get an amazing contemporary flashback to what was going on at the time. Doing this in Facebook is a little awkward because it scrolls from current to past, which isn’t really the way you want to look at things if you’re trying to reconstruct a history. Plus, it doesn’t really solve the question of preserving this memory (somewhat of a pensieve for Harry Potter fans) for the future. Does anyone really believe that Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg will be around 50 years from now?

But it is possible to download your full messaging archive from Facebook. It’s a bit of a long story, happy to share with anyone interested, but I’ll leave it out for now. The result is EVERYTHING, and not in a very useful format for searching -- a whole series of folders, one for each messenger chat you EVER had. Like the picture in the cover photo.

At this point, you will need to rummage around a bit in this digital box to find the conversations that you’re REALLY interested in preserving. 

The sibling chat I found for the five years surrounding COVID and my mom is a weird and very transparent trip down memory lane. There were so many things I had forgotten. The trip reminds me what a weirdly humorous set of siblings I have. Our spouses too, but they are excused from the sibling excesses exhibited on the chain. I am guessing they probably have a “non-blood Messenger chain” somewhere to compare notes on the six of us.

Not all six of us chime in on the same things. My sister June Mancini Rickli (and William Rickli) and I (and Mary Glenn Mancini) had the most to do with the daily care for my mom during this time, so we tended to have the most entries on the chain, many of which are status reports (or complaints) about my mom. It’s a little embarrassing at times to see the hard evidence of our impatience. I wish that Rexulti ad on age and dementia-related agitation had been aired earlier; we would have benefited from it. Jennifer Mancini Carroll constantly tries to recreate recipes that my mom had for family meals, although I am convinced that that is not a very long list. It's hard to guess what posts will prompt a reaction from my brother Joe Mancini. My brother Jeff Mancini probably chimes in the least, unless the topic was how awful Starbucks coffee is, the relative merits of breakfast cereals, or strongly held Italian restaurant preferences. But all of my siblings jumped right in with a volunteer of help when things got too intense with Sal. Jeanne Mancini Beres seems to be on the road constantly between Ohio and various locations in Virginia and North Carolina. 

And oh my gosh, the glimpse back into all the Sal craziness during COVID and all the ups and downs and uncertainties of that time. How she survived being quarantined in the apartment I’ll never know. She was a tough nut, and jumping back into the history of her most vulnerable time reminds me that we all face a future that at some point will become tenuous. The trip through this single chat brought so many memories back to mind that I had already completely forgotten.

As I’ve said many times in the course of Immigrant Secrets, I am often astonished at the normalness of the childhoods our parents gifted us. I don’t know how we got so lucky. Looking back day-to-day-to-day at the COVID period particularly reminds me of our good fortune. 

I don’t want to forget that. I don’t want to forget how we all pulled together. It’s not that I don’t trust Mark Zuckerberg (well I don’t, but that’s another story), but I think I am going to print out this very long Sibling Chain.  And leave the artifact in a box for Lucy or Alex or Arlo to find someday, and maybe gain a tiny bit of insight into who these strange people were.

-----

This is part of a series of posts designed to keep me busy and off the street, inspired by Ann Patchett’s book of essays. Hopefully some of these musings (well, likely not this one) will contribute to a successor to Immigrant Secrets (https://www.amazon.com/Immigrant-Secrets-Search-My-Grandparents/dp/B0B45GTTPP).

You can get the posts directly HERE (https://www.searchformygrandparents.com/subscribe) or use the subscribe button on this page (https://authory.com/johnmancini).