Your parents can talk to your children’s grandchildren and descendants further down the line Friday if you participate in the first National Day of Listening.
“The day is about stopping to look at and honor someone by saying, ‘Tell me about your life. What is the most important lesson you’ve learned? How do you want to be remembered?’ ” said Dave Isay, a familiar voice from National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” and creator of StoryCorps, a nonprofit that has facilitated more than 24,000 interviews between ordinary people.
More than 45,000 people from 50 states have recorded their conversations at StoryCorps booths. All recordings are burned to a free CD for the participants and archived at the Library of Congress for future generations.
In your home Friday with a video camera, tape recorder, computer or even pen and paper, StoryCorps asks you to find an hour to listen to someone’s story. “When you take the time to listen, you find a poetry and value in everyday people’s words,” Isay said. “It’s in our DNA as humans to listen and learn from one another. Listening is the nature of collecting wisdom from humanity.”
In a recorded StoryCorps interview, Marylander Anna Wise, 96, recounted to her daughter how she courted her husband.
“Well, I was sassy,” she recalls. “I turned on all the tricks that I knew. I winked an eye or two now and then. … We danced the night away. We went to speakeasies. We did all the things you’re not supposed to do, and to make a long story short, which people are not fond of doing, we just sort of agreed it was time to get married [Nov. 11, 1933.]”
“We never know what diseases are going to catch up with us,” she said about her husband’s battle against diabetes that took his leg and eventually his life.
“It’s amazing the things people can live through when they have to. So you get through it. And you get through almost anything. And you live to be 96 and sometimes you wonder why. But then when you look up at the blue sky, you think it’s going to be all right.”
