Impetus

Once upon a time, back in the 1970s, there was a girl who would go to Hawaii every summer to visit grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. She grew up listening to the stories her Grandpa Goto (pronounced go-toh, not go-two or that old programming command that would tell the compiler to go to a certain line of code) would tell, old folktales or some such. As the girl grew older, she lost count of how many times she heard the same story again and again. Even though she heard these stories over and over, she never bothered to commit any of them to memory or write them down. Her mother’s cousin kept saying how her mother should write them down because Grandpa Goto was getting older and when he passed, the stories would be lost… The girl’s mother never wrote them down either, but she remembers the stories better than the girl. (Thankfully.) The cousin made one recording of Grandpa’s story telling, but no one really knows where that recording is and the cousins are no longer speaking to one another.

Now, 40 some odd years later, the girl is now a middle aged woman and only remembers one or two stories, but only in general. The details are lost. The exact words used, the timing… all of it is gone. And that is sad.

On the other side of the family, the Hirose side (pronounced hee-row-say, not high-rose), has a few family legends of its own. Some are amazing, some are just everyday. But the people who know them are slowly fading away.

And so, the woman or rather I would like to start recording the stories of my grandparents, of my family using my parents, aunts and uncles as sources. It’s about 30 years too late (Grandpa Goto passed away in 1986), but at least some of it will be preserved. Oral tradition preserved in written form electronically, I wonder how any of my ancestors would have felt about that.

And I don’t want to only share the Goto stories. There are Hirose stories as well. Some stories are family legends, some are historical fact. I want to record as many of them as possible before it is too late.

Why am I doing this? I mean, why did I wait so long? Quite frankly, I didn’t want to do it. I felt that it was sad, but well, I live in the present. That was the past. Why bother? Some things are just meant to fade away, right?

And then in the past month, a book was published about one of my great Uncles. I won’t link the Amazon listing as the book portrayed the one side of my family in a rather unflattering light. I don’t want to bluster about how wronged and angry I feel about this portrayal of my ancestors and sound like I naively believe my family is perfect. (Honestly, a little fact checking and a google search on the author’s part would have solved a few of my issues with the book…) I also don’t want to spread the word about the book and possibly affect the sales of the book either positively or negatively. This book caused a great uproar in the Hirose family. After a few phone calls and Facebook messages amongst my family plus the forceful encouragement of one cousin who was more affected by the book than I was, I now know that it is important to preserve what I can about my family and my ancestors. Maybe it’s sad that a lot of it was lost, but I think it is sadder that many of my young cousins will have no idea about where they came from nor will they ever get to enjoy the stories I heard and I did nothing about it.

So, this is what I’m sharing. This is my story. I hope you enjoy the ride.