Dan Curtis ~ Professional Personal Historian

I’m flying off tomorrow to Dawson Creek in Northern British Columbia. I’ve been invited by the South Peace Hospice to present two workshops for the community on life stories and their importance.

I’ve been looking for a way to open my workshop and  I’ve found it. Tell a story! Seems obvious doesn’t it? We all know the power of stories to grab people’s attention.  I found one the other day in the Globe and Mail newspaper. I included it in my Monday Links Roundup a couple of weeks ago. The story is written by Diane J. Strickland who lives in Calgary and it’s called Grandma taught our son a lot . She writes movingly of her son earning $200 for typing up his grandmother’s stories but as she says, “what he learned about our history was priceless.”

Here’s an excerpt from her story:

One of Grandma’s stories was about waving good-bye – how it is one of the first things we teach our babies to do, and how important it becomes as we reach all the endings in our lives. She wrote about waving good-bye when you left family and when people went on a journey. On our wedding day, my husband and I waved from our hotel balcony in Toronto after the day’s events were over, catching my parents as they got into their cars to go home.

She wrote about all the good-byes we don’t get to have in life, and how much the memory of the last good-bye then matters more. I noticed how purposefully and tenderly our son hugged my husband and me when we departed for Ontario for a month this summer. He said he loved us. And he waved.

Online newspaper articles have a short lifespan so I urge you to click here to read Diane’s story. Better yet, make a copy so you can use it in your own workshop.  Remember the power of stories to grab people’s attention!

Photo by Giulio Nesi

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