Today the phone rang at the office, and I answered it to hear an excited voice say, “Hello! It’s Virginia, and I was so pleased to receive your solstice card once again!”
The solstice card is the Modern Memoirs greeting card that we send twice a year to former clients/authors. And I knew immediately who Virginia was—a former client from over a decade ago.
“Virginia! It’s almost your birthday!” I said.
“Yes! I can’t believe you always remember that! And I’ll be 96 this week,” she answered, to my surprise.
I remember her birthday because she wrote about it vividly in her memoir/family history, Sicily to America: [My Father’s] Life Story, which we published in 2014. Although it has been a while since we worked together to create her book, I still have in mind many of the personal yet fascinating details, especially that her father’s birthday was the same as hers.
Sketch of Virgina’s father’s wine press
Her father had come to the U.S. from Sicily and started a life in the Boston area. Virginia remembers the homemade wine press he had in the cellar. Every September her papa would buy Concord grapes—60 boxes of grapes—to make two barrels of wine. (There is even a sketch of the wine press in the book.) Her family members and cousins would take turns first crushing the grapes in the wine crusher, then pouring it into the wine press, and then transferring the juice into barrels through a strainer. The barrels would sit for at least a year for the fermenting and aging process.
I also learned from Virginia that in later years, every year on her birthday, she would have a small glass of red wine and toast to her father’s memory. I thought it was such a simple, gorgeous way of honoring her father. And so I always remembered the birthday—just around winter solstice time.
“Why write a memoir or family history? Because it is bigger than you, and it is your loving gift to the past, present, and future, and it will come around again just when you think everyone has forgotten.”
Now, as we spent a few minutes on the phone catching up, our aged, familiar connection resumed. I toasted aloud to her and her father with an invisible wine glass. And I had that nourishing feeling I get every time a client’s book is finished and they are utterly relieved it’s in their hands—their work of love, an immediate gratification after an arduous job well done. I’m elated, knowing the invaluable emotional returns will come to the author year after year after year.
Why write a memoir or family history? Because it is bigger than you, and it is your loving gift to the past, present, and future, and it will come around again just when you think everyone has forgotten.
Happy 96th birthday, Virginia, and we raise a toast to you and your father. Remembrance is a blessing.
Ali de Groot is director of publishing for Modern Memoirs, Inc.