I was going to post up something about the Black Friday madness (even picked out some music), but I heard something yesterday which I think is much more useful.
Talk of the Nation yesterday had on David Isay, director of the StoryCorps project – a project that seeks to record American oral history on a grand scale. The oral histories they record come from the famous and the not-so-famous – with the goal of letting people ask important questions of history from the people who mean something to them and letting those stories fill in a very large picture of the incredible richness of American life. Some StoryCorps stories are edited and broadcast on NPR (and are mostly riveting), but participants get a CD of the session and the Library of Congress is cataloging these works.
Isay and StoryCorps are working to launch a new day-after-Thanksgiving tradition – the National Day of Listening. They want to encourage us to sit down with someone whose story we think is important to us or to our families and get that story recorded. We are mostly surrounded by family and friends over this holiday and often the high point is when you get to the old stories and tales. Recording them makes sure that you can share them with people who can’t travel to be with you as well as with future generations. And pretty much all of us are surrounded by recording technology, so it isn’t as though this would be a major hurdle.
I like the idea of an alternate tradition to Black Friday, and I very much like the idea of getting the people you love the most to get their stories on record so that you have one more tapestry of family and friends to share.
So what do you think? Who would be the first person in your family whose story you’d want to record? Any burning questions you’d like to ask that person?