I am my Mother's daughter in many ways. One of the earliest indications of this is my love for books that precedes my earliest memories. Much of my childhood was spent with my nose in a book, so much of my childhood, in fact, that I remember my Mother having a talk with me about life beyond books. She didn't want me to grow up without the cultivated capacity to spend time with real people in real time, as she was concerned I may be content to invest every waking hour with written pages. She told me she had to train herself to spend time away from books, and that I needed to do the same. I don't know how either one of us did this, but I can absolutely say that my Mother and I were/are both enthusiastic lovers of real people in real time, so we navigated successfully our need to balance love of books with love of people. Yay for us!
I can also say the same for Mama Sisson, Mother's mother. Mama Sisson, born Dorothy Irene Russell, February 9, 1920, the second of 8 children born to Delbert Wellington and Florence LouElla, was hungry for knowledge. She too surrounded herself with books, which included a set of encyclopedias and a big dictionary, and my memory points to her constant activity of looking up words to learn what they mean, to remember better what they mean, or looking up things in an encyclopedia. I imagine both Mother and Mama Sisson would have a hard time, like so many Americans do these days, myself included, balancing their quest for information and insight with intentional time spent with people, had they lived long enough into the age of the internet, when mere clicks and moments can produce vast loads of details that previously took arduous effort to glean. Interesting side note: Mama Sisson had only gone through the 8th grade when she was growing up, and desperately desired to know more. An avid lifelong learner, it was only her formal education that was paused when she was a teenager. When my Mother, her oldest child, began high school in the late summer of 1958, shortly before her 14th birthday on September 10th, Mama Sisson, age 38, joined her, and together they earned their high school diplomas in Gila Bend, Arizona, graduating at the respective ages of 17 and 42, on Thursday, May 22, 1962, Alistair Begg's 10th birthday.
With that background, now let me share about birthdays and biographies. I have a big coffee table book called One: celebrating 50 years of Compassion International. Since Compassion began in 1952, this book was published in 2002, and I bought it as a used copy in 2019. It sits atop the coffee table in the Cozy Christmas Cottage "Guest Rest" as I call the restroom for guests. This morning I realized that in all the time it has been there, I haven't picked it up. I did read through some of it in 2019, but since then, I have only carried it around and kept it. So I decided to pick it up. It begins, "Compassion's story is the story of One. It began in the heart of one man: Compassion's founder, Everett Swanson." I didn't read any further. I placed the almost cumbersome book back on the coffee table and picked up my phone to search, "Everett Swanson, date of birth" after a few minutes of finding other Everett Swanson's but not the Compassion one, I searched, "Everett, name meaning" and found the name means 'brave" and then discovered Swanson means son of sven, sven meaning "young man", "young warrior" or "servant"! Wow! Back to my birthday search, I came across a book about Everett Swanson that was published on the 2nd day of THIS year. That is certainly timely for me! A sample of the book was available on Audible, so I clicked to listen, hoping the book would start at the beginning and would share Everett's birthday. I was not disappointed. He was born on the 7th day of the week, December 13, 1913, making him just a few months older than Papa Sisson, my Mother's father, who was born on the 17th of March, 1914. Now I had a timeframe for this man's life, and was ready to learn his story, which I have downloaded to my Audible account and look forward to the listen.
And so it is. This, I believe, is the answer to the question I have been asked numerous times in my life, "why do you want to know everyone's birthday?" I have taken the long way of explaining this, but I too, was curious, so I thought about it, and this is what makes the most sense to me, as to why. I don't remember which teacher it was, but I do remember the lesson. We were learning about different kinds of books. Fiction, nonfiction, science fiction, mystery, biography, autobiography, etc. I was so fascinated by these categories that were whole worlds in themselves, organized so brilliantly! Emphasis on organized. Organized, categorized, connected information has long been important to me. I've always been this way, I realize. Information that comes to me "out of order" or without context, gets lost. It's like coming across treasure on a long walk and having no pockets or packs to carry it, so you either walk on by, almost immediately forgetting it, or, if you do pick it up and carry it with you, eventually, your hands become sweaty, or weary of holding whatever it is, and you drop it along the way. But! If you have pockets, either in your clothing, or a backpack or satchel, you can carry your treasures along with you and keep them until you find a proper place to put them, in a basket or shelf, when you're hypothetically speaking, "back home". (and yes, I have put a lot of thought into this, as on one hand, my memory serves me quite well, and even I am amazed by the details I can recall, and on the other hand, facts that one might expect me to remember, I don't seem to have a clue about....so this is what I concluded. That I didn't have a pocket for it, when the information came.) So, with the organized categories of reading presented to me, like the other children, I quickly chose the ones I liked and the ones for which I had no interest. This is what our instructor discouraged us from doing. Their encouragement was to be open to exploring all the genres of reading, as we might be surprised to discover that we like something we didn't imagine we would. Nope. I was open, but I was also already right about myself. I am, in this way at least, who I was then. My foremost interest in reading is people, which meant biographies and autobiographies, and most often, nonfiction. I want true accounts, and mostly, of people. I devoured whole series of biographies as a child, and this now, is my entire point of this whole post/cast: biographies most always begin with birthdays. Depending on the writing style of the author, it may be the first sentence, on the very first page, or after a story about that person to catch your interest, but then when the chronological events of their life is shared, you learn their birthday. Since biographies were the way my reading was formed, that is why, I believe, I have a "must know" name AND birthday--rather, birthDATE, as I also need to know the year, even when just making an acquaintance. One more thing on this, also connected to my early years of reading biographies. One reads a biography to KNOW that person. I have never been a chit-chatty kind of girl. I want to KNOW you. Which is why my stepfather thought I might enjoy being a journalist. Because I was always asking people lots of questions about their lives, and I enjoyed writing. He may not have been wrong. But one can't pursue everything. I find people fascinating. I love their stories, their histories, and how they fit into the context of the time in which they were born and lived, whether that is someone I am meeting through history, or in real time. Especially the ones of whom a biography has been or perhaps should be written. People who have lived their lives for a purpose bigger than themselves. So, there you have it. I am interested in your biography, your autobiography, if I have the honor of meeting you. I want to know who you are, the story of your life, and for me, that begins with your name AND your birthdate.
