Oral History

The funeral was in Oklahoma City, his home town, though he had no love for it. It had been a condition of a great-aunt’s will from way back that he be buried there. When the young marrieds accepted the money upon her death – it had gone down in family history just how much they needed that sum – they had accepted that condition as well. A man of his word, he had reserved his place there years ago.

The hospital, the death, the days before the wake, the journey, the wake, the funeral, the cemetery, those were the file drawers that Ellie was sorting her memories into.

She would be reviewing them for years, and took a visceral pleasure in ordering them in sequence and by geography for ready recall. It was her way of stilling her mind as they drove back home.

Now, another jolt of memory shook her. And compared to the relatively refined activity of gentle recall, this was like pure electricity.

Here were voices coming up on the radio, fresh as life.

Well, not the radio as such, the tape player; Ellie didn’t even know that the new SUV had a tape player. One of the kids – it must have been Todd, the one with the knack for gadgets – had squirmed between the two front seats and slipped one of the cassettes into the player. The machine clicked, took up the tape and started playing.

A voice familiar over the entirety of her life came on, indistinct with his R’s, the flattened Midwest accent.

“This is tape #7 and I am Earl Gentry,” said Ellie’s father. “I’m sitting here on the back porch with Aaron Doyle, my son-in-law, who cooked up this crazy scheme.”

If Todd had the gift of gadgetry, Abbie was the one with the taste for history. It was she who had brought the idea of taping oral histories home from school and it was Abbie who seemed to have the craving for contact with the past.

She may have brought the idea home, but it was Aaron who took it up and made it happen.

“Honey, she’s got something there; let’s capture some oral history with our folks while we still have them with us. One of these days it’s going to be too late.”

Aaron’s voice on the tape now. “That’s right, Earl, but in truth Abbie really cooked it up and I’m just executing it.”

He cleared his throat grandly.

“We’re sitting on the back porch here in Boca Raton, Florida, proud home to the Gentry clan, on the occasion of the annual family get-together. This is my – what is it, Earl, 12th such gathering? – and I can admit now that I was scared to death the first time. For those of you who don’t know, we can get 30 or more people in and out of this house on these week-long celebrations; activities include the boats, the annual Gentry golf tournament, the annual Gentry spades tournament, the annual treasure hunt…”

Ellis smiled to herself. Yes, her father and mother always did go all out on those annual reunions, there was no suitable excuse for missing even one over the years. Under his gruff nature, father was a sentimentalist at heart and planned these occasions from the first airport pickup to the last wave goodbye from the driveway.

She looked over.

Aaron was quite a bit less competitive than that whole crew – it was one of the things she loved about him, the way he looked around at the frantic activity with a kind of patience but also amusement – it would be much more like him to wonder where the closest library was.

Ellie knew that these taping sessions were as much an opportunity for peace and quiet for Aaron as they were a chance to capture history on the fly.

That wasn’t to deny that a number of facts and episodes hadn’t come to light about her father that she was completely unaware of. She had never been entirely pleased that her father opened every tape with the words…

“You’re not gonna ask me about my love life now, are you?”

…just as he did here on the tape.

“You’re not gonna ask me about my love life now, are you?”

“We’re going to reserve a full half dozen tapes for that topic,” said Aaron, “maybe a dozen. But for now, let me review: on tapes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, we have already covered the early years on the farm, the school years in the one-room schoolhouse, building houses with your family all around the smaller towns bordering Lake Michigan, the years in the military. Now, Earl….you got out of the service, you had all that home-building experience, and Florida was getting ready to boom. How did you even know about it? Wasn’t it hard to leave your family up there in Illinois? Didn’t any of your brothers – Uncle Jeremy or Uncle Jake – want to come with you? And how much money did you have in your pocket when you landed down here?”

And then Father would be off and running. He had enjoyed Aaron’s inexperience at business, and like Ellie, had a passion for explaining things all the way through. If you didn’t get something after Earl Gentry had explained it to you, you never were going to get it, that was the joke in the family.

And Aaron, ever the patient listener – she looked over again, no matter how impatient father could get – ever ready with a prompting word or a leading question.

The tape machine was voice activated, so the listener never realized the passage of time between questions and answers and in truth, you never exactly knew how long each tape was going to be. They were labeled – this one was labeled “August 13, 2006, at the lake, Florida” – but the length of each tape, there were dozens, was a mystery.

She glanced over.“You never did get around to talking about the love life, did you?”

“No, no,” said father, indistinct with his R’s, the flattened Midwest accent, “he never pressed me on that. The soul of politeness, that was your Aaron.”

“Grandpa,” said Abbie, ‘you don’t sound like you do on tape. But Daddy sound just perfect.”

“Oh, sweetie, he was perfect,” said Ellie. “Dad, whatever am I going to do now?”