Everyday people get a vehicle for life stories
A typical conversation between a 13-year-old daughter -- iPod appended to ear -- and her mom might go something like this:
Mom: ``Honey, please clean up your room. It's a landfill."
Girl: ``Later."
Mom: ``We're going to see Aunt Frances tomorrow."
Girl: ``Whatever."
But in the StoryCorps trailer this weekend, the conversation between Sue Hyde and her daughter, Jesse McGleughlin, was an eye-to-eye, heart-to-heart talk between two people who have shared the same household for nearly 14 years but were for the first time revealing some intimate memories and feelings. There were tears. (A Kleenex box is a staple of StoryCorps.) There was laughter. Joy. Nostalgia. Regret. Sorrow. Pride. Love. The spectrum of feelings that pass -- often unspoken -- between a mother and a teenage daughter.
Hyde, 54, and Jesse, who'll turn 14 this month, live in Cambridge with Hyde's wife, who is Jesse's biological mother, and Max, who is 11. Jesse also has two dads in her life: the sperm donor and his partner. It is not your average household, and Hyde wanted some alone time where she could ``interview" her daughter about her thoughts.
StoryCorps was happy to provide the forum. The mobile oral history project, which partners with National Public Radio, arrived in Boston last week and will remain here until Oct. 22. Sessions are reserved online or by phone; Boston is fully booked. The silver Airstream sits outside the Boston Public Library and serves as a sort of confessional. People come in with their spouses, their children, their lovers, their grandchildren, their colleagues, friends, and neighbors. They ask each other questions. They have conversations, revelations. A man recently proposed to his girlfriend in a StoryCorps booth.
Philip and Michele DesAutels of Waltham signed up for last Friday. They married in 1994, three months after they met in the Peace Corps. ``When you're sitting at the kitchen table, you're talking about the stuff of the day," said Philip, who works for
Though some sessions are superficial, many get to the heart of life's big issues: love, death, and family. With participants' permission, a CD of the interview is archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress ``so your great-great-great grandchildren can listen to your grandmother's voice someday," said StoryCorps founder Dave Isay. He got the idea 15 years ago, when he gave kids in a Chicago housing project tape recorders and asked them to document a week in their lives.
``StoryCorps at its most basic tells people that they matter and won't be forgotten, which is comforting for all of us to know," Isay said. ``It says that the voices of everyday people are as interesting and important as the celebrity nonsense we are fed everywhere we look. It gives you this perfect moment with a loved one."
That perfect moment -- 40 minutes, to be precise -- is why Sue Hyde signed up for a slot. She listens regularly to the short Friday morning segments that run on WBUR and says she has been captivated by the conversations: ``It's giving people a chance to say things to each other that wouldn't come up in everyday life."
In her case, it was Jesse's question that sparked a poignant moment. ``What do you think the differences are in the way you grew up and the way I'm growing up?" Hyde then told her of life in a rural town in Illinois where everyone was white and Christian. She didn't know how to reveal to her parents -- or anyone else -- that she was gay.
``I didn't tell my mom until I was 19, and do you know what she said to me when I finally did tell her? She said, `What did we do wrong?' It was very sad, a very sad thing for me."
Jesse said softly, ``It must have been. But I think if she knew you now, she'd be proud because you would have changed her mind."
As tears trickled down Hyde's face, her daughter said, ``You can cry, Mom, it's OK."
Hyde went on to describe a deathbed scene in which her mother took her and her partner's hands and placed them together on her chest. ``You two be happy," she said. She died the next day.
``It was really very important, but it took my whole life to get there," Hyde said. ``I don't want you ever to wait that long to hear that from me or from Mommy . . . I want you to know that I always want you to be happy."
Near the end, Jesse asked her mother: ``What are you the proudest of?"
A pause. ``I think the thing I'm most proud of is that you and Max are going to start your lives with the idea in your minds that other people are valuable and important and that by honoring other people's lives we can create a better world to live in. That's the human project, to get past those barriers between people . . . and share what is beautiful in this wonderful planet we live on."
Jesse: ``I think our family is doing a really good job of that. You and Mommy raised me and Max to be that way."
Hyde: ``I love you. I'm very proud of you."
Jesse: ``I love you, too."
They hugged, wiped away tears, and left the trailer with a CD of their conversation, perhaps for Jesse's great-great-great grandchild to hear someday.
