Photo by Arthur Edelmans on Unsplash
The word “grandpaphone” came to me as I woke from a dream.
In the dream, I was at a family reunion. Some youngsters were showing me a trick that they learned. They poured a liquid on an old LP record. It flattened the grooves, making the surface shiny and smooth. I said they shouldn’t do that and explained what the grooves were for. I wanted to tell them about playing my grandmother’s old wind-up gramophone as a boy. It played recordings on cylinders instead of disks. But first, I wanted to figure out whose grandkids these were. They must belong to one of my siblings. However, they seemed not to know who I was talking about when I named my brother and sisters.
I realized the meaning of this dream in what my son calls “Ha-Ha time” (half asleep and half awake).
The children who erase the LP and do not remember my generation’s names will be my grandchildren’s grandchildren. I don’t know all the first names of my sixteen great-great-grandparents. Do you know yours?
Unless your ancestors are the kind of people recorded in history books or you are an obsessive-compulsive genealogist, you are unlikely to know much about that generation.
The dream confronted me with an aspect of mortality that may be even more profound than the eventual death of my body — the erasure of the fact that I ever lived.
I heard this hymn playing in the background:
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Isaac Watts revised by Brian Wren
bears all who breathe away,
they fly, forgotten, as a dream
dies in the dawning day.
That was when I woke up, and the word “grandpaphone” came to me. A grandpaphone picks up and plays the vibrations of the ancestors through the generations.
That is the best I can hope for. My efforts to become immortal aren’t bearing much fruit.
If my descendants have an enormous trust fund, it won’t bear my name, and they won’t have other reminders of my existence.
I did publish a book of sermons, but it went out of print in the 1990s. The paper in the copies I have on my shelves is already turning yellow.
I can count on appearing in the histories of the churches I served, but I fear that most of those churches won’t make it past the middle of this century.
The dream was calling me to recognize a truth my culture ignores –the importance of ancestors.
My particular Christian tradition has been guilty of looking down its nose at what it calls “ancestor worship.” So we reduce one of the Ten Commandments: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the earth,” to handing out corsages on Mother’s Day.
Rabbi Abraham Heschel was once asked what this commandment meant for people who had been abused or abandoned by their parents. Rabbi Heschel said the commandment does not require us to pretend that bad behavior is honorable. What it does command us to do is to have a reverence for the mystery of our own existence. Our parents, their parents, and all our ancestors are the symbols of that mystery.
Our ancestors do, indeed, represent a mystery: the mystery of who we are, how we got here, and, maybe, where we are going.
I was lucky to know all four of my grandparents, one of my great-grandmothers, and a step-great-grandmother. Some people come from family lines full of the kind of people who get biographies written about them — or at least an article in Wikipedia. Some people don’t even know the names of the two people who made them. But we all have this in common: a family tree that doubles in size with every generation: four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents — you can do the math. We don’t often realize that if even one of our 128 ancestors seven generations ago had not “come through,” as it were, you and I would not be here.
Perhaps your reaction is, “I’m just a random set of genes that came together to win the life lottery.”
Or maybe you think like my grandchildren. Once, when all four of them were together, I told them how my 15-year-old self got up the nerve to reach out for their grandmother’s hand, and she let me hold it. After telling that story, I asked, “Are you here because I reached for her hand? Or did I reach for her hand because you are supposed to be here?”
They all agreed that their inevitable future existence was the reason I crushed on their grandmother.
Whatever you think—and I admit there are days when I think my life is a lottery ticket and days when I think my life is inevitable—just thinking about it should fill us with reverence for the mystery of our existence.
You can create a very simple daily discipline of remembering your parents and their parents, grandparents, and ancestors and bowing in gratitude, thanking them for the gift of life. Since I have added that to my morning routine, I feel a reverence for life that I haven’t felt before.
I think I am playing the grandpaphone.
You can still pen a good sermon, Roger. Thank you.
Roger,
I LOVED this article! I read it first without knowing you had written it, and by the end I thought, “Roger would really like this; I’ll send it to him!” Haha. Cathy
That’s funny!
Love this, Roger!
A very great reminder to appreciate where we came from as well as recognizing than we are important to those who’ve come from us!!!
Roger, this is a beautiful piece of writing. I am reminded of how our Grandmother prayed for every one of us, her grandchildren, every day. I learned that information from you. Thinking of them each day, offers them something in return for the gifts and the many prayers they offered for us. What a beautiful practice.
Thanks, Roger. I agree with you and Heschel about the mystery of it all. I am in the final stages of self publishing my 2nd poetry collection. (Dream You, available this spring on Amazon) Do I feel the urge to collect, organize, edit, and otherwise dredge my files like a river filled with silt, because of my sense of the value of my musing, or is it because close proximity to grandchildren makes me much more aware of the passing of time, and the passing of me? I fear it’s more the latter. Is our desire to keep playing the “grandpaphone” as long as we can our personal quest for some small degree of permanence, even though all evidence would point to the truth of impermanence? I am repeatedly drawn to the traditional Hindu teaching about the final stage of life as the Sinnyasin, the ascetic…final renunciation and all that. I say attracted to it, but the messiness of a grandchild’s kiss, the sticky hands of a shared school project, the joy of retelling old stories keep me firmly rooted in my day to day temporal life. Alas…‘it’s a mystery.
For many years, I’ve wondered, “Who were the Dawns before me?” I’m made up of parts of many past “Dawns”. Who passed on the passion for reading rather than dusting? Who had the gift of music? Who loved cats passionately? Who hated the taste of Onions? Who cried when they were both mad and glad? What did these pieces of Dawn look like? sound like? feels like? Someday, I hope to know. . . .
Dawn, somehow I missed this until today. Yes, our genomes appear to be hugely complex jigsaw puzzles. Let me know if you track down the person who preferred reading (and maybe writing?) to organizing and cleaning.
I just read this, Roger, and find so many truths in it. My great grandmothers were alive when I was a preschooler, but I have no memories, other than a few photos, of them. My memories are many of my grandparents, but think of my grandchildren who only knew Paul in their young years and never knew their other grandpa who died before the 1st was born. Maybe that’s why I think it so important to create memories with them – family vacations or dinners one-on-one. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and creativity. Yes, the grooves on the record get erased.