Transcription

            I’ve turned to transcription.

            My own words seem to have temporarily dried up, so I am streaming my grandparents’ words.  So far I’ve made it from January to May 1915.

            In those five months of letters I have learned much about George Johnson and Dana Humphrey, the grandparents I barely knew.  Dana succumbed to Parkinson’s Disease in May 1962 and George to a massive heart attack in November 1962.   Through the last fifty years Mom has kept their memory alive with her stories about them.  Now that Mom’s memories are much less reliable, I am turning to their correspondence—about two file drawers worth, carefully preserved in chronological order.

            Their letters begin around 1912, so I’ve entered the story late.  I had only a few minutes to grab a file to begin—that was back in January, when Mom was still here at home.  I snatched the file on the sly simply because I could not bear the thought of the repeated questions that would emerge if I let it slip that I was finally starting to transcribe the letters, something we both have wanted me to do for years.

            I remember Grandma as the tall, silent presence.  By the time I was born, she was well into the shadowy descent of Parkinson’s.  She moved slowly and unsteadily.  I believe I saw her fall once, for fear tinges the lone memory I have of her walking from the kitchen to the den.  Her long hair was a beautiful white, always pulled back in a tight bun.  In her letters I am coming to know a passionate, caring, intelligent woman emotionally bruised from childhood but remarkably resilient.  She sang in choir at Oberlin, believed in the power of education to transform lives, exercised a solid Christian faith, and was madly in love with George. 

            Grandpa I remember more.  He entertained me with amazing feats like taking his partial denture out or blowing into his thumb to make his arm muscle magically inflate.  He was fun and security and surrogate father all wrapped up in one.  As a young man his hope was to go into the ministry.  He ran track, sold everything from magazine subscriptions to fountain pen ink to cooking extracts in order to finance his education at Wesleyan, and had a marvelous sense of humor. 

            Knowing some of Grandma and Grandpa's later family history brings a particular poignancy to reading their college confidences to each other.  I know that they married on July 17, 1917.  George never entered the ministry, though he taught adult Sunday School.  They named their first child George Dana.  He became a chemistry professor at K-State.  Portia Elizabeth was a teacher.  Priscilla Charlotte, the only surviving family member, taught physical education.  And Humphrey Robert died in a flight training accident when he was nineteen.

            Transcribing George and Dana’s letters offers me the opportunity to get to know them after a lifetime of wishing they were still here.  I am quite sure that someday my own words will well up to tell their story so you can know them, too.