The Golden Memoir Society? As if...

I have no idea how or why it appeared, but a month or so ago, an ad popped up promising the Gift of Your Parent's Voice. The gift was going to come from something called the Golden Memoir Society. And what popped up was actually a schedule. You pick a time and date and then you spend $199 - the only payment option is PayPal - and someone from the "society" will spend 45 minutes talking to your parents.

We record interviews with mothers and fathers, telling the story of their family's life - in their voice - so everyone can listen to them again and again! You will receive the completed MP3 within 24 hours after the call is conducted. (Source: Calendly)

Although he's been dead from over 50 years, I'd give anything to have 45 minutes worth of my father's voice telling stories. He was an excellent, colorful story teller with a wonderful sense of humor. Even after all these years, I can still conjure up his voice in my head, and it never fails to put a smile on my face. 

I'd love to hear some of his funny stories. Or some of the funny stories told by his best friend, Spike, who was a professional-level raconteur. One of the saddest moments of my life was at my father's funeral when I heard someone sobbing a few pews back. I turned and saw that it was Spike. This was before friends and family told stories at Catholic funerals, but I know if it had been the custom back then, Spike would have rallied and told some good ones. 

One of my favorites was the one about the time when the two of them went to a recruitment event, held at a downtown Worcester hotel, for a job selling vacuum cleaners door to door. This was during the Depression. They were just kids. But they were laughing so hard at the demonstration of the vacuum cleaner's power - which including running the vac up and down a giant fake thermometer and showing how well the vac suctioned the red liquid - that they ended up trying to bolt out of the room, only to find the door locked. Needless to say, they didn't get the job, but they did get another one going door to door giving out baked bean samples. 

Anyway, I'd love hearing my father tell 45 minutes worth of stories. 

And there are some questions I'd like to ask him, maybe even some serious ones, about the death of his father when he was eleven, about meeting my mother, about what he would rather have done for work than what he ended up doing. (He was promoted from the shop floor of a fine wire factory to become a salesman.) There are other things I wish I'd asked him when I had the chance. 

But what did I know? I was just a kid (14) when he first developed kidney disease, and not much more than a kid (a few weeks past 21) when he died.

I don't have the same desire to hear my mother's voice, which I can conjure up as easily as I can my father's. 

Part of this is the cold hard fact that my mother was nowhere near the storyteller that my father was. But mostly it's because I knew my mother as an adult. I was 51 when she died, and we were pretty close. I'd had 30 years more conversations with her than I had with my father. There wasn't all that much that I needed to know. 

Still, there are some questions I wish I knew the answer to, but they're so painful, I don't think I ever would have asked them. (Most of them are around the death of my newborn, perfectly healthy sister Margaret, my parents' first child. This event haunted my mother; it haunted our family. I would have liked to know more about her feelings, about my father's, too. About how they both coped. Interesting, I spent the night with her before she went for a heart procedure, and I almost brought up the topic then, but something held me back. Why inflict pain by asking what my grandmother's reaction was to Margaret's death? I'm pretty sure she would have blamed my mother. Everything bad that happened to anyone in the family had to be someone's fault, and my poor mother - the oldest in her family - was the frequent repository of Grandma's need to blame. Anyway, I was with her in the doctor's office reviewing the results of her procedure when she had a major heart attack. She spent the final two weeks of her life in the ICU. Needless to say, we didn't spend much time strolling down any memory lanes that weren't upbeat ones.)

But I digress.

To get back to the Golden Memoir Society. 

I have two major questions.

1. Who wants to outsource the task of talking to your parents, or grandparents, or sibs, or other relations, or friends? Isn't this something you should be doing on your own? Why miss out on this opportunity? And, since this is your loved one, there won't be a time limit. No paltry 45 minutes. Plus, if you've ever interviewed someone, you know that an answer can always open up a new line of questioning. And these off-script meanders always make the interview more valuable. Is the Golden Memoir Society interviewer going to know what's worth exploring and what's a dead end? I think not.
2. Then there's the mystery element to this enterprise. I couldn't find any info anywhere on them. No website, no social media, no reviews. No names. (Is the interviewer a human or an AI?) Just an ask to fork over $199 via PayPal, and give up your loved one's phone number. Oh, yeah, and please share anything that will help prepare for our meeting. Even if for some reason you decide to outsource the interview with your loved one, do you want to blindly give out their phone number and provide a few helpful details? I'm absolutely the suspicious type, and this one screams SCAM to me. All that glitters isn't necessarily golden, and that includes memoir societies.

Which is not to say that I wouldn't mind having 45 minutes worth of my father's voice...That would be a real gift. Just wish there was some way for someone to give it to me.