Your Story Started Before You Did

Things travelled down to you before you could talk. A way of laughing. A word your family says that no other family says. What the people in your house do when something goes wrong, which you learned by watching, not by being taught.

Some of what arrived is wonderful. Some of it is not. Every family has both, and anybody who tells you theirs only handed down good things is not being straight with you.

I come from people who were not written down. For a long time nobody wrote us down on purpose. So we carried things instead, in drums and in the way we say certain names, and it turns out that things carried like that are very hard to lose.

Nothing is really forgotten. It is only unremembered for a while, and somebody can go back and get it.

That somebody is usually young. Older people have often stopped asking why we do it that way, because they have done it that way for forty years and it has stopped being a question.

You still ask. That is not you being difficult, whatever anybody has told you. That is the job.

And once you look at what came down the line, you get to decide what carries on. That part is genuinely yours.

You are already passing things along without meaning to. You are allowed to look at them first and choose.