It took half a century and a pandemic to help me make the journey, but my grandfather’s voice transported me back
This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy.First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines atThey say that babies in the womb learn to recognize their mother’s voice even before birth, and that people on their deathbed may still be able to hear the voices of those around them even if they are not conscious. A human voice might be our first – and probably our last – sensory experience.
So quite unexpectedly, listening to the tape, I found myself dropping in for a belated visit. It was reminiscent of my childhood experience of holding my ear close to the bedroom floor on the second level of my grandparents’ two-story farmhouse. Pipes from the oil-burner stove in the dining room below carried the adults’ conversation through the house, providing some guilty pleasure as I listened.
As I played and replayed the tape a few seconds at a time, typing the words I heard and inserting the punctuation to reflect the inflections of the voices, I began to imagine. I could picture McDonald Creek that ran high in the spring, which made wading across it on the way home from school perilous.
But the most striking thing about listening to the recording was that the stories and unfamiliar words – including farming jargon and now-outdated turns of phrase – made me feel like an outsider to my own family. I felt left out of a time and place, a stranger to important aspects of life that comprised my own history. I wanted to belong.
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