A few weeks ago I found myself in an old-fashioned garden in an old-fashioned part of town. There were so many flowers and herbs that I could only vaguely identify, although the owner could proudly rattle off the name and use of each. We had a nice chat, during which I almost forgot the purpose of my visit.
       Finally, off into the twenty-first Century again, I found myself wondering whether, when that nice old gal was gone, anyone would know or care what she had so lovingly created. I started remembering the gardens and streets of my youth. Not the pretty, plastic, manufactured neighborhoods of today, but the world in which I lived over two generations ago. I asked myself whether anyone would care.
       Then I started recalling the things that my grandparents and parents told me of their early days. Simpler days, but as alien from today as if they had been settled on Betelgeuse. We had time, when I was a youngster, to chat about such things. Remembering came with repetition. "Tell me again about the train that ran into the tombstone yard, Grandpa."
       Today we don't have so many moments to sit and chat with our elders or our descendants. People move about, they get busy with formal games that once were informal and elastic and out in an unclaimed lot. The past is still gone, but it is now unremembered.
       I'm so glad that my folks and grand-folks were so patient when I asked about things of their day. I was lucky enough to realize that those days were really different, not just different places on the calendar. Not that they were exciting or even happy, just different. You can't get that from the movies or the television. In their view, the past was happy, clean, interesting and healthy. Everyone was above average. If there were horses in the city, they were litter-trained. The streets were made of highly polished cobbles, or, later, shiny and unblemished asphalt.
       In the manufactured, Hollywood view there were no bullies lurking on the corner to make a young kid's every day a Hell. The girl who missed school because she was sick had a cold. Not diphtheria or meningitis or polio. The man who had afternoons to spend playing catch with his son was just being a good guy. He hadn't lost his job with no prospect of another. The old guy who coughed a lot as he walked up the street had an allergy, not silicosis from thirty dark years down a mine.
       Just as Hollywood can't portray the bad, it has no basis on which to build the good. What kid today knows the fun in playing "nipsie" in the street, never fearing being swallowed up by the traffic? What kid today has even run to the corner where a father has opened a fire hydrant to give the neighborhood kids a half hour of respite from the heat before the firemen came to chase them away?
       This, then, is the charge. We who lived need to record that living so future generations know what life was like. There is no other source for the information. If you can write at all, write down all you can remember. Don't worry about continuity. The voiced reminisces of the old are not structured either. I've found that the few books published by my few-greats-back ancestors are fascinating. History books can't tell me what the original name was of Kennebunkport.  No one is left from that time. But going back leapfrog through several families, we can piece it together. And we know they were lousy spellers when they called the town "Cape Porpos." But now we know that there were porpoises enough to attract attention of people who were busy every waking moment just staying housed and fed.
       What a tragedy it is when I ask a longtime settler of a town about some feature or name and he has no idea. And doesn't care! How did Chagrin Falls, Ohio get such a dismal name? Seems that the original town planners couldn't spell the name of Col. Juan Seguin (or, maybe, Dr. Edouard Seguin - the trail is a bit cold.) But, if your grandparents (and before) had lived there, maybe you'd like to know.
       So, folks, you have a responsibility. Write down those little anecdotes that often start, "Well, in those days. . ." or, "When I was a kid. . ." Any readable medium is okay. If you want, you can print them out on your computer with three-hole paper and make copies for all your kids in ring binders. If you want, write me and I can tell you of several ways you can make little books at home.
       But, do it! If nothing else comes of it, at least you have that most precious (and evanescent) accomplishment - that of securing a legacy. "My grandpop was once a ditch digger and dug into some Indian mound that nobody knew about." Or, "you remember that big quarry on the side of Mount Judge? Your great-great-grandfather had a quarry there. Until he went West on the Gold Rush."
       Do it. When you imagine having that sort of thing from your antecedents, you will want to. And it gets easier as you go. My little biography started out as a ninety-page journal and finally weighed in at 725 pages in two volumes, cheaply spiral-bound by the local print shop. And I don't regret any of the many hours It took to create it. It took me back there again.