Hey, Virginia:

Your post reminded of something I wrote awhile back about memories. Here it is:

About Memories

Memories have a life of their own. Through the years, each of the family's memories become interwoven into a single history. Never mind that they may not be accurate. They are right, which is even more important than being accurate. Memories become family myths and legends, accepted as being true. They make sense out of lives that sometimes don't make any sense. In incorporating family memories into the songs that I've written, I've taken memories without regard to whose memories they are, or when and where the events occurred. They are all a part of a whole.

In writing Uncle Jim for example, the song really isn't about Uncle Jim, as such, even though he and his son Howard are in the first verse. Farm life was farm life, and my memories of spending time on my Uncle Jim's farm merge with memories of times spent at my Uncle Ross's and my Grandfather Holliday's farms (both my memories and those of my Mothers.) The verse:

   "Old Uncle Jim he sits, sits in his chair he sits
    Reading Reader's Digest for the fourteenth time
    Puffing on a bowl of old Prince Albert
    And sipping on some elderberry wine
    And the kids will all be sitting 'round the Motorola
    Listening to their favorite show
    Sitting, swapping dares to be the first upstairs
    And trying not to shiver, 'cause the floors are cold"

has enough memories for the whole family, stretched out over a couple of generations. It was my Father who read Reader's Digest for the fourteenth time. I remember the small smoking cabinet that sat next to his chair. It was my Father's chair and none of us were comfortable sitting there. If we dared to sit in the chair, we'd immediately get up and offer it to my Father if he entered the room. The smoking cabinet doubled as a magazine rack, with slots on the sides. It stood on spindly legs, and was made out of cherry wood, darkened to a deep reddish-brown over the years. If you opened the small door on the front of the cabinet, there was a single compartment, lined with copper where my Father kept his Prince Albert and his pipes. And what about my Uncle Jim? I don't know whether he smoked Prince Albert, or not. I don't even know if he smoked a pipe. But Prince Albert and Reader's Digest were part of a time and place I remember well. The elderberry wine is a memory of my Father, too. My Father made wine in the basement. Our basement had just a dirt floor when I was a kid. It was a mysterious, musty, dark place. In order to get into the furnace room, you had to walk through the darkest of no-man's lands and feel your way over to the cord hanging from the bare light bulb in the center of the furnace room. We had a long row of elderberry bushes along one side of the house, and my Father would harvest them in the fall, crushing their small dark, pungent berries into a paste to ferment for wine. Many years later, long after I'd left home I made elderberry wine. I was smoking a pipe in those days, although Prince Albert was too harsh for my taste. And I must admit, I wasn't reading Readers Digest, even one time. But all of those memories have become a part of who I am.

The Motorola? We had a Motorola when I was a kid. Or at least I remember that our large, floor radio was a Motorola. That's enough for me. Whatever brand it was, it had a large, raised green dome with a map of the earth on it. Gazing at that eerie green light, North and South American would merge into a strange-looking genie. I suppose that makes sense, as the radio took us to amazing places. My sisters and I would lie on the rug in our living room, listening to our favorites mysteries like The Shadow, and The Whistler, or be scared out of our wits by Inner Sanctum.   Or perhaps it would be The Hit Parade, which we listened to faithfully every week to see what the number one song in the nation was. Maybe Mom would make a batch of Divinity, chocolate or wintergreen fudge and a large bowl of popcorn for us to nurse through the night. The kids in Uncle Jim were me, my sisters, Mom and a couple of my Aunts when they were little kids, and my cousins Howard and Robert. In my memory, we all grew up together. The part about swapping dares to be the first upstairs is Mom's memory of her life on the Waterman Farm. Never mind that they didn't have electricity, so she and her sisters couldn't have been sitting listening to that Motorola. It wasn't me, either, because we didn't have an upstairs, unless you counted the attic, which you could only reach by climbing a ladder, propped precariously over the stairway leading down into the basement. I knew about "shivering, 'cause the floors were cold," though. We only had two bedrooms in our house, and me being the youngest, I migrated from an enclosed section of our front porch during the summer, to the living room or dining room in the winter. The porch was on posts, with nothing between the floor and the ground except cold Wisconsin air. But, it was the only room I ever had of my own, growing up and I'd stick it out as far into the winter as I could. I'd stand in the living room next to the door leading out onto the porch and brace myself for the cold blast of air when I'd open the door. I'd hop across that floor like I was running across an iceberg and dive into bed, crunching myself into the smallest possible ball. Then slowly, I'd venture a toe out under the covers, and wait until it was warm there, taking a few minutes to finally get the bed warm enough to stretch out. My Grandmother Holliday heated rocks in the stove to warm my Mother's bed out there on the Waterman Farm. It never occurred to me to ask Mom to heat rocks in our kitchen stove to heat my bed.

The third verse of Uncle Jim is another collection of family memories:

   "After all the work was done, down by the cow pond
    The kids would all go sliding through the old corn fields
    Waiting for the bell to call them home to supper
    And racing old Buster down the hill
    And Jim would just be finishing the evening chores
    He'd be working by the back yard light
    And even though it's late, you know the stock can't wait
    You've got to get 'em bedded down for a Winter's night

Now, Buster was Mom's dog, long since dead. He wasn't a Stephen King monster chasing the kids down the hill, with red eyes glowing like coals. It wasn't Jim finishing the evening chores, either. It was my Uncle Ross. I can still picture the barn on my Uncle Ross's farm. When I was a kid, it was my cousin Robert I who'd come racing back to the house at dark. If we were lucky, my Aunt Ruth would have freshly-made molasses cookies and ice cream waiting for us.

And that's how memories work. It's easy to understand how through time, family memories become as much myths and legends as actual memories.It's the shared memories that make us families.