“My name is Jeanne Greenfield and I was born in a red house
in Silverdale, Missouri.” That is what my Aunt Billie had written on the back
of a drawer in my grandmother’s old dresser. She wrote it in 1946 when she was
fifteen years old. The drawer was removed because my mother is moving from her
home to live with my brother. The dresser has been with us for well over fifty
years and no one had ever seen the writing until now. It is funny to
contemplate my Aunt Billie, now deceased, writing her “autobiography” at fifteen.
Aunt Billie’s autobiography, written on the back of a drawer, reveals things about her. I knew her as an
adult, a bit careworn from the job of raising a family of children and then
grandchildren. I never knew her as a teenager but like most of us, she must
have been experimenting, looking for her own identity, trying to create
something to be remembered by. She was able to do this by some words scribbled in
pencil on the back of a drawer.
Words are a powerful medium. They last much longer than
these “bits of stardust” our minds (and souls) inhabit. They reveal things
about us to future generations. Flannery O’Connor made carbon copies of every
letter she wrote, realizing that someday they would be read by countless
others, long after she was gone. Her letters are revealing, they show a woman
of intelligence, faith, humor, and, sometimes, a woman too caught up in the
present moment to understand the historical implications of events occurring
during her lifetime (such as the Civil Rights Movement). Other letters by other people reveal things
that are often surprising. They show a surprising humanity in philosopher
William Godwin, otherwise known for his cold, observations; they show the heart
of Albert Einstein when he encourages a young girl to “not mind” that she is a
girl; they show the compassion of a Lincoln, the wit of an Austen, the selflessness
of a Dorothy Day, and the vulnerability of a Thomas Merton.
These beautiful relics from the past that show us the heart
of the author will not apply to the current generation. Instead, we have the
anonymity of facebook where we can spew vitriol without thinking about how the
future will reflect upon us. I have a friend who lovingly wished a group of
young, innocent, African schoolgirls well. She was verbally berated by a man in
a way that I am sure he would not have done had they been face to face. But the
internet gives us this lovely buffer where we can be as rude and ignorant as
possible. There are entire pages devoted to hate and ridicule. There are
conservative pages and liberal pages and the most distasteful I ever heard of,
a page called “kill obama.” Is this the way we want to be remembered by future
generations…as a group of screaming ideologues who could never get anything
done because we were so busy shouting at one another we could never hear?
There is an old saying, “if you can’t say something nice,
don’t say anything at all.” I think, before your little fingers begin their
dance across the keyboard you should apply that same saying to what you type.
When I found my Aunt Billie’s autobiography it made me laugh and smile and
remember, with love, a remarkable woman. When future generations find your
facebook posts, how will they remember you?
