Opinion

Seashells and thunder

Friday, August 7, 2009

I spent a lot of time at my grandmother's home when I was very young. I can still visualize both the inside and the outside of that house so clearly. There are a couple of poignant memories from that home and that time that are connected by the simple theme of "sound."

The first resonance recollection from her home was a very old seashell. According to my grandmother Hart, this seashell was brought home to her family by a distant relative.

My grandmother was named Helen Kinkead Hart (there are several different spellings for her maiden name of Kinkead in the Warsaw/Benton County area). The man from her family was either a great-great-grandfather or a great-great uncle.

I inherited my story telling flair from my grandmother. There was never a story that she did not embellish just a little, and no one who knows me can doubt that I have the same talent.

She told a lot of stories about this relative, Bob Kinkead. One of those stories is verified in the Benton County history. In that story, Bob, and some other settlers from Virginia, purchased the Warsaw Valley from the Osage Indians for cash in the 1830s.

In 1849 and 1850 Bob Kinkead, she reported, led two separate wagon trains to California during the gold rush. He came back by sea both times. On one of those trips he brought home a seashell from the coast of California to his family.

As I write this article, I have paused to look at that seashell which sits next to my desk in my home office. It was the one heirloom from grandmother's that I wished to possess most of all.

As a kid, she always told me that if you listened carefully when you held this shell to your ear, you would be able to hear the ocean and the waves.

I looked up the actual factualness of this possibility, and found that the tale is not true. There is a scientific reason for the sound you hear in the shell. The smooth, curved interior of the shell is very resonate, and it does make you think you hear a sound something like the sea. Fact or not, I still like to think it is the ocean from 160 years ago.

The sound of thunder was the other acoustic memory from my grandparent's home. On warm spring and summer evenings, we used to have storms that seemed much worse than today's thunderstorms.

When I was very young, the sound was both frightening and mysterious. Grandmother always told me that the loud thunder was just the sound of "God and Saint Peter" bowling in heaven. As the thunder would roll in the distance she would say that was the ball rolling down the big lane in the heavens.

Even at that very young age, I think I sensed that grandmother and the rest of the adults were "pulling my leg." Like Santa Clause, the Easter Bunny, and many more "make believes," this was something I enjoyed very much, even if it was not really authentic.

The sounds of our youth still seem all these years later so real and alive. Age has a way of dimming the senses. A child's senses are so tuned and full. We could hear a pin drop, and read fine print with no glasses.

Perhaps childhood was so much more interesting because of the "fairy tale" simplicity of life for the very young. It certainly was for me.

I am sure my grandmother was pleased when she watched me pick up the seashell time after time to listen for the ocean. That's another interesting action that kids exhibit. They never seem to tire of their favorite things.

How often did one of your kids or grandkids ask you to read the same bedtime story over and over again? Children like the comfort of the familiar. It gives them a sense of security that psychologists say is natural and healthy.

So it was not uncommon at all for me to love listening to that seashell. Neither was it abnormal that every time I heard thunder, I would say to grandmother, "they are bowling in heaven again!"

Like many of you, I have passed along these same two hearing related things from my past to the future. The seashell will go eventually to one of my younger relatives. Before then, I hope to watch some of the grandkids listen to that famous shell too.

As for the "bowling in heaven" thunder stories, that is another matter. I'm sort of outdated in that area. Kids today are exposed to so much more information at such a young age, that they may think I'm crazy if I try to pass along grandmother's thunder ideas to them.

It is the contact with the very young that keeps us young as well. The joy you find in your own memories and artifacts do translate to the little ones of the present.

So go into that closet or storage area where you have kept all that seemingly useless stuff for so long. I bet you will find your own seashell type of item that some young relative would love just as much as you once did. They will probably love it even more because it came from you.