I'm currently on a Random Gifts of Art performance tour
in Berlin, heart of the thundering history of the Reich. (Where it appears this
might be the first generation to come up with the idea of trying peace
to see how that works! Pretty well, I'd say. And would add that the US and many nations should take the hint!) But not to get distracted...I had nothing to do our first day here but go to a few
of the 150 museums, and then check my email.
There I found a message from a
stranger named Lisa, a woman who said she's the Rochester, New York
historian and every morning she does a ritual of an eBay search for
postcards of the city. She wrote me to say there was a touching
postcard of Dr. Lee's Hospital in Rochester, written by "Nina" for sale
on eBay that she thought might be from my family. But the email was
already two weeks old! I immediately searched to see if I could find
it. I looked over the eight or 10 possibilities but no, it was already
gone. So I wrote to her and said thank you very much, but alas, it's too late.
 |
| Nina as a teen, in the 1890's |
But
it turns out there were three separate emails from Lisa interspersed among the trash! The next
one a few days later gave a transcript of the note on the card about Nina's mom's condition, and mentioned that the card was written to Lisa's ancestor, who was Nina's cousin. It very much looked to me like "Nina" was my great aunt!
Then the third email, still before my own response, went on to say that Lisa was so moved by the card that she wrote a blog post about it, which posted––totally incidentally––on my birthday!
So here, for your delectation and delight, is my birthday present, Lisa's very touching post; (please don't spill ice cream on it):
I of course wrote back to Lisa with my profuse thanks and my answer to her question: why do we attach to people we've never met? That's a curious thing about people: how easy it is to get emotionally bonded to some stranger, just through some snippet of evidence that drifts through history like a message in a bottle. Of course, I knew Nina in the flesh, but the only reason I find this snip of her life 100+ years later is because a stranger felt she did, too.
So, just to see if this works with you, read the above article and then come back and listen to Nina–– in a taped letter made at 106 years old!––say goodbye. See if you can tolerate this without any emotional hookage!:
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