My Grandfather's Legacy

A young woman I know recently introduced me to the work of Sarah Hutt. Sarah is an artist who developed a unique concept for memorializing her mother, thirty years after her death. The project takes the form of a thousand-line poem, burned onto the bottoms of one thousand wooden bowls. You can read some of the inscriptions on her website, My Mother's Legacy.

I found this concept quite inspiring, and I’ve begun writing lines about one of my grandfathers, using the name I knew him by. Here are a few of them:

• Pop smoked a pipe
• Pop was a photographer
• Pop took Robin and me to baseball games
• Pop made the best sourdough pancakes in the world
• Pop taught me how to catch catfish
• Pop taught me to make purple-toned photo proofs with press frames and sunlight
• Pop thought everything I did was perfect
• Pop let Robin and me push his VW Bug up and down the driveway
• Pop laughed at every joke I ever told him
• Pop always had a smile on his face
  

I have pictures to go with some of the memories. Others must stand on their own. I don’t expect to do any wood burning. My memory lines will stay on paper, or perhaps I’ll put them into a slide show together with pictures, somewhat as Sarah Hutt did on her website. Photostory 3 for Windows will probably be my choice for this.

Perhaps you’ll also find this idea of starting a string of memories by using a name or title (my mother, my grandmother, my Aunt Bessie, etc.) followed by discrete memories a great way of jumpstarting story ideas or simply use the string of statements as a unique story unto itself. I’ll bet you have a fair idea of what my grandfather Pop was like from only these ten statements.

Write on,

Sharon Lippincott, aka Ritergal