When told that we should form groups to talk about our “belonging,” three of us misheard the instructions and thought we were supposed to discuss longing. We’d been invited to bring a belonging of personal value to an event at the Museum of History and Industry but realized that what really attaches us to objects is the longing to be connected with other people; in our past or present.
I was carrying a 1909 journal that my great-aunt kept the year of her mother’s death. Laura had a silver bracelet given to her by her grandfather, but that had belonged to her great-grandmother, a woman who had died a mysterious death. Rita had a dried ear of corn, the husks mere wisps, a few more kernels breaking off as we moved throughout MOHAI’s “Belongings: A Gathering of Stories.”
It was the second Open Forum hosted by MOHAI as they prepare to move to their new South Lake Union location in 2012. At the first event they invited a wide range of community members to share stories about their path to the Northwest, whether by immigration, Boeing, wagon train, college, medical treatment, Microsoft…sheer love of water and mountains.
At the first event I was surprised there wasn’t anyone from the Nordic Heritage Museum or Ballard Historical Society. This time I helped remedy that by inviting my new friend Laura Cooper (met through the Ballard Authors event) because she’s involved with both. In just the previous three days she’d marched in the parade with Ballard Historical Society, interviewed her great-aunt as part of the current oral history project on the Scandinavian experience during World War II and together we’d been passing out flyers for the “Bring the Ring Back to Ballard” project. I’d also invited my writing friend Rita because I knew how much she’d appreciate shared stories.
Despite inviting participants to share belongings of special value MOHAI had warned, “This isn’t Antiques Road Show.” Nonetheless four strangers per table pulled out their heirlooms: engraved knives, yellowed letters, poems, a sailor outfit, grandmother’s quilt, jewelry, corn… Then we switched tables and did it again.
Over the course of five hours people dispensed with standard introductions, instead putting something close to their soul onto the table, sometimes with a thud, sometimes in a whisper. One woman had not brought an object, but she had brought her aunt whose hands were full with records kept since her grandparents came from Independence, Missouri by wagon. The facilitator Anne Stadler called what we were creating through discussion, “Our living history.”
After being shuffled between each other with our belongings and stories we were invited to host a discussion topic. That was when the three of us from Ballard heard longing, instead of belonging, and convinced Laura to host one of the nine groups: “Longing for belonging.” Our group included a Chinese-American woman who didn’t feel a sense of belonging until she was almost 40; a newly arrived Mexican-American graduate student who misses her monthly family dinners of 50+ in San Diego, a woman who almost couldn’t bear how much she missed “home” in Virginia when she moved here 34 years ago. Talk turned to whether Seattle is unwelcoming to newcomers, sometimes called the “Seattle freeze.”
Yet our very discussion of the topic seemed to render it more exception than rule. I wondered if the ability to connect with others resides more inside or outside of us. The first day I met Rita, who was born in the same state and year as my mother, she told me about listening to the corn in a field in Illinois with her brother before his death. When my daughter was ten we traveled to Illinois with my mother for her 50th high school reunion. We too sat next to a cornfield and simply listened. It’s at once a hush and a roar, like waves traveling on an ocean of tall stalks bearing ears of corn. Listening to the corn connects me to Rita, and to my mother and daughter.
Then it was Rita who led me to Bertha Davis when her Sunset West neighbor “needed” a writer. Meeting Bertha prompted me to ask Laura to help me with the bell project when I first met Laura last fall. Each of us seemed to connect with one another in one day; destined to spend future years uncovering even more commonality.
After the break-out discussions Rita, Laura and I finished the event sitting in three consecutive chairs in a closing circle. We had swapped stories with strangers throughout the day and then been reunited by our discussion on longing for belonging: the desire to feel a sense of connection to others and our community as a whole.
It wasn’t until Laura mentioned sound at her turn; how several people had mentioned feeling a sense of belonging because of a particular sound, and she mentioned our bell project, that I realized another connection. It was Bertha Davis who wanted the Ballard Bell to ring again because she’d said, “It shows our community is alive.”
Bertha had died just the day before, at the age of 97. Even as we were mourning her loss we were also celebrating that she had put us together in those three chairs. She had connected us just as she had connected fifty years of students and families by giving every person she met a sense of what made them special, conferring a sense of belonging with the squeeze of her hand. The Ballard Bell will be her legacy, but it will be our living history – that of Ballard, and friendship.
