Institutional memory

I'm visiting John's family for Christmas, and it's been making me think about family traditions, though not necessarily the Christmas kind. (There's some of that too, of course, and the in-church moment of lighting candles during "Silent Night" gives me a little twinge because I'm not with my dad in Pennsylvania. This is, of course ridiculous, especially because my parents haven't lived in Pennsylvania for years. But still.)

What I'm thinking about, even more, is the kind of stuff that turns into family legend. This morning, my mother-in-law told me about John and his sisters' childhood favorite book. It's about the adventures of two wily cats, and it's entirely in Danish. Do any of them speak Danish? Not really. But it was a childhood favorite based solely on the pictures of adorable cats doing comical things and the truly excellent delivery of my father-in-law. It's that kind of thing that I'm thinking about today.

And it relates to the Handbook, too. Right after the section I was reading most recently, addressing camp sanitation and not addressing latrines, there was a brief series of weather-related axioms. One of them, "rain before seven, clear by eleven," made me jump.

It's my own family legend.

See, my paternal grandparents lived a large part of their lives in upstate New York, the real, small-town farming country of Brother's Keeper (my grandfather grew up down the road from those guys), the kind of place the Handbook was built for. They're both also great lovers of folk wisdom and country phrases, describing a long day of traveling as having been "all round Robin Hood's barn," that sort of thing. They observe the clouds on a Tuesday and have a rhyme to explain how the weather will be the following weekend, or see a particular type of bird and declare that it's going to snow in six hours. There may be some truth in it, for all I know -- I'll admit, my outdoor observational skills aren't where I'd like them to be.

My father operates a little differently, and the rhymes were never for him. As a kid, he came up with a way to put the lie to the folk wisdom once and for all. And one rainy morning, he presented the family with a rhyme he'd made up himself. "Rain before seven, clear by eleven." To his delight, my grandparents took it up at once, as if they'd been using it all their lives.

Like my in-laws' Danish storybook, my dad's weather axiom became part of our family's mythology. On a rainy morning, one of us might look at the other and wryly observe "rain before seven . . . ," knowing that the others would see both our optimism and our wariness -- it wasn't, after all, actual folk wisdom -- just my young father's creativity. (Before you think my father was a bad kid, let me tell you otherwise. He was a Boy Scout himself, and, with a few other boys from his neighborhood, went so far as to form a secret club dedicated, of all things, to helpfulness. So don't worry. He was a good kid, just driven to distraction by all this infernal rhyming.)

Regardless. For my entire life, plus fifteen years or so before I was born, the fake weather axiom remained. But today, but lo! In 1911, fully (at least) fifty years prior to my dad's invention, the Boy Scouts of America picked out this very bit of country wisdom for Handbook inclusion. So where does that leave us?

Had my dad heard the same phrase before? Probably. Heck, he was just a little kid. Had my grandparents? Absolutely. But, regardless, "rain before seven" is never going to turn into a legitimate piece of advice for me. It's always, always going to remain one thing and one thing only: a story about my family. It crystallizes a moment, one I never saw but that, thanks to repetition (and to knowing all three major players so well), I can picture exactly. It's as good as a photograph.

How about you? What kind of family phrase or story brings you back, even to a place you never went or a time before you were born?