Last weekend, my mom showed me these old books she’d pulled out of her closet. She told me she’d nearly thrown them away before she realized what they were.
Guest books.
My Grandmother’s guest books, specifically. The first book starts in 1942 – 70 years ago – when she would’ve been in her twenties.
These days, it seems guest books are only kept at weddings – if at all. But back in my grandma’s day? They were often kept meticulously, to record the comings and goings of guests in one’s home. Looking at my grandmother’s books, what struck me most was the sheer volume of entries. She was often referred to as “the hostess with the mostest” and it’s clear why.
What also moved me where the small snippets of details – like this 6 year old’s scrawling signature dated 1945 -
Or the notes left by guests indicating what my grandma had served that day -
But something else touched me, thumbing through these books. I realized what I was holding was my family’s recorded history, as told through dates, details, and signatures. Here is my grandpa (Reuben) coming for dinner with his sister and mother, before he’d married my grandma. They’d marry later that same year (1948).
One book was a housewarming gift in 1960, the year my grandparents had purchased the home they would live in through my own childhood.
Attached inside the cover is a color-faded photograph of my mom with her younger sister and brother, outside of their new home. I love my mom’s saddle shoes in this photo.
What might surprise you is that my grandma had every reason in the book to not be much of a hostess. See that house pictured above? It was a small home with only a single bathroom and a couple bedrooms. Not only would my grandparents and their three children live there, but my grandma’s mother had also lived with them. My grandma never drove either, she relied on others to take her places or made use of the bus system.
And in the early ’60s, my grandpa would become very ill, both physically and mentally. His experience in WWII may have contributed, plus there was a grave medical error that left him with frequent seizures. Then there was a failed brain surgery. My mom tells me he was never the same after that. He had to relearn how to do simple things, and sometimes forgot the names of his own family members.
As a child, I only knew my grandpa as a sullen, quiet man. I never heard him say my name and he would spend hours doing mundane tasks like cutting catalog pages into strips or sweeping the sidewalk. I don’t know that he ever knew who I was. He required an extraordinary amount of care. My grandma provided that care. And I never – not once ever – heard her complain about it. She cared for him with good humor, grace, patience, and love. She also didn’t let it stop her from being generous to others, and opening her home and life to them. My grandma was a social butterfly.
The guest books also cover the time my parents were dating, and then married. You see many “Rick and Marilyn” entries, including the farewell dinner in August 1976, the day before they left for LA.
And the first “Rick, Marilyn and Angie” entry was left in March 1979, in my mom’s beautiful cursive. The celebration was on my grandma’s own birthday. The woman hosted her own birthday party, and that makes me smile. I would’ve been two months old.
And then a couple years later, my sister’s name joins the entries.
My grandma, mom, me, and baby sister in 1982
Sometimes we feel guilty we don’t keep thorough journals or build beautiful scrapbooks. We grow discouraged at the talents of our crafty friends and feel inadequate to document our family’s stories. We’re afraid that our efforts will never frame the memories “just right,” or we get too busy and we don’t try at all. But something as simple as this – signatures of people coming and going, the important and unimportant events that would fill up a year, a decade – begin to craft a story bigger than the sum of their parts.
The final entries are in 1998, fully 56 YEARS after the first book was started. My mom reminds me this was about the time my grandma got sick, and needed to move into assisted care living. In November, we will remember the 10th anniversary of her passing. I am so grateful she made her guests sign all those entries. (Although knowing her, it may have been more like polite badgering at times.) I’m so glad she left these books behind for us to peruse on a quiet Saturday afternoon decades later.
I wanted to share this with you today for two reasons. First, to reflect that being generous is more about an attitude of a heart than the resources we may or may not have. My grandma’s life is testament to this. Second, to show how important memory preservation is to later generations. I’m so glad my grandma did something simple rather than nothing at all.
In the end, it may matter less how well you tell the story than that you had the courage to tell the story at all. May you all have that courage.
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