We Are All Archaeologists

I once had a great job listening to people tell their stories. This was a prefiguring of my Hospice chaplaincy, a sort of trial run. I was twenty years old, and it was my first experience of asking complete strangers intimate questions and finding to my amazement that they were more than willing to respond. The work involved doing the in-take at the Legal Aid Society in lower Manhattan. I don’t remember how I landed this dream job or whether I even got paid, but it was so mesmerizing that I can tell you now I would have done it for nothing. The potential clients sidling into the office, not making much eye contact, needed help with civil proceedings. They were not looking for criminal defense attorneys. They were simply people who didn’t have the rent money and were being hounded by collections agents or threatened with eviction. Sometimes they couldn’t make the payments on their refrigerators.  The legal issues were more or less boilerplate and repetitive from one case to the next, but each one was just slightly different, each person embellishing the bare bones of the story with the beating heart of all the details. She says, my husband got laid off.  His boss caught him drinking on the job. He says, I have a heart condition and can’t work. My mother’s got the Alzheimer’s. 

During the beneficent administration of Jimmy Carter, I had another one of these gigs funded by a federal program that allowed you to invent a job you wanted to do and then paid you to do it. Mmm. Ahh. I drove around in the Berkshires interviewing people in their eighties and nineties about “what it was like in the old days.” I remember one dairy farmer in suspenders telling me about going once a month in the horse and buggy to buy provisions at the feed store. If you grew up in Manhattan, this sort of thing vibrated like a camel ride across the Sahara. It was that evocative.  I have an insatiable appetite for other people’s buried narrative treasure and especially for the remote past. It’s beyond investigative journalism, more like archaeology. 

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

This desire to scrape the dirt off the surface of reality became the beginning and the end of my vocation at Hospice. It became the means and the source of prayer. I would wonder with the dying…What have you done with your one wild and precious life?…as Mary Oliver would say. When I think about that question now, it sounds like an interrogation. What have you done for me lately? But it didn’t feel like that when I was with those folks. It felt like opening a door to an expanded vision of how life had unfolded, where it had led them. If my time at Legal Aid was a trial run for my chaplaincy, Hospice became the internship for my own self-inquiry. 

I never asked questions that called for yes/no or other easy answers. I always approached people by asking them to tell me the story about their work at the paper mill, the noise, the heat, the shop steward. Or tell me about the tobacco fields, the endless, the rows of green plants. How cold was the water in the swimming hole in the spring, how did they pick the teams for sandlot baseball? What were you fighting about with your sisters? Who was the prettiest when the three of you looked in the mirror? And then I would follow the crumbs to see where they would lead me. It’s the same with my own reflections. It doesn’t matter where I start. It can be in a closet, the long, narrow one in my bedroom or the one in the hall with all the freshly laundered sheets. It can be the one to the left of my grandma’s bed that reeked of mothballs. Whichever door I open, the entire universe of my childhood rises up. As long as I begin on 83rd street where the sense impressions sit in thick layers of sounds and smells and textures, I can from there branch out to visit any corner of my early life. The car horns and screeching tires on the Avenue. The pickled fish, the scratchy needlepoint settee. I’m there, baby. But once I leave home and venture out into the great world, it’s as if the potency of the stories becomes diluted leaving an enfeebled and reduced capacity for memory. I don’t remember much of anything about my twenties and may need some sharper tools. 

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. In January, seventysomething is delighted to offer artwork, prose, and poetry by Rosemary Starace. All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething, have access to the archives, and become a contributor to Many Voices. Your ideas are always welcome.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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