Saratoga News

Letters & Opinions

Memories, like possessions, fade away over the years

By Carl Heintze

My dad was one of the best "letterers" I have ever come across.

A "letterer" is someone who prints words by hand rather than using handwriting as most of us do. It's a skill that I think either is or has been dying out, mostly because computers make it so much easier to letter drawings than doing it by hand. But in the day when my father was doing his lettering, that wasn't true. He was a civil engineer, and even as today engineers had to work with drawings, maps and charts.

Engineers were taught to be not only precise in how they lettered their drawings, but also very neat. Even when I started college--which was before computers became everyday--engineers were required to letter well.

For many of them it was a skill which, once learned, lasted a lifetime. Rather than use handwriting, they lettered even personal letters. I know this from letters that have survived my father. Not much else of him has. That's because he died when I was 4 years old when he was only 40. Even then that was an early age at which to die. As with everyone who dies before they are old, he left a lot behind, much of it disorganized.

Some of it was the remnants of his service in World War I as a member of the U.S. Corps of Engineers. Some of it was black and white photographs, pictures he took on his many travels to various jobs: the Panama Canal, Hawaii, various bridges built in half a dozen states and highways he laid in California.

Because he was a first lieutenant in the Army, he had to buy his own uniform and for many years--like the lettered drawings he left behind--they lay around the house, getting older and mustier until they finally disappeared.

Much the same thing happened to the photographs. For years both their negatives and the prints were saved in books, but one day my mother tossed the whole lot (without asking me, alas) and they were gone forever.

In the end almost nothing is left of what was his: a beautiful brass compass he used in surveying, a brass magnifying lens he must have used to examine rock specimens, a letter he wrote me just before I was born and which I am certain he thought he would deliver to me when both he and I were much older than we were when he died.

Of his military career nothing much remains today, except his silver lieutenant's bars and a couple of Corps of Engineers badges he once wore on his collar.

I write about all this not to tell you what's left, but rather to point out how impermanent are our possessions. It takes half a hundred years to dispel most of what most human beings leave behind them when they pass on--at least that's my guess.

The clothes, the badges, the letters, the pictures, most of the material possessions an individual accumulates can't withstand the onward rush of time. Things just don't last, even if they are somehow conveyed to a museum for preservation.

Whether by chance or design, what we leave behind us disappears for the most part.

What's left beyond that is what we manage to leave in the minds of others, and that's even more fragile. It's made of the tissue of memory, the recollection of how someone looked at a certain time, of how they acted in certain circumstances. It also used to be the essence they left in the letters they wrote, but that's become less and less a part of preservation since the advent of e-mail and the computer.

Instant communication, alas, also often means instant forgetfulness. If we had only e-mail to depend on it's unlikely we would have the treasure of, say, Abigal Adams' letters to her husband, President John Adams, with which to resurrect the Adamses and their days on Earth.

In my dad's case, even memory is a fragile, almost nonexistent canvas on which to paint his picture. I have a few memories of what he was like, but I was only 4 when he died and that's about the age when we begin to remember things. I have the stories my mother told me about him, but she tended to gloss over his faults and foibles, making him something of saint.

I don't think he was a saint. I do think he was human with all that means. But I really have no way of knowing for sure what he was like. The memories no longer exist.

My sister was only 2 when he died and doesn't remember him at all. (She also doesn't hold much with memorabilia and so she's turned everything that she had been left from him over to me, and that's very little.)

So I struggle, probably vainly, trying to recapture what's essentially a ghost and gaining for my troubles pretty much what one gets when one tries to catch a ghost: nothing.