F. Buechner: He da man
by chuckofish
“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.”
― Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces
dual personalities 
I’m afraid I spend an awful lot of time in that room, probably more than I should, but then as a historian (or so I call myself), I consider myself a caretaker of the dead. If we don’t remember, who will? And they have so much to tell us.
Well, me too. My dear husband accused me once of ‘obsessing’ over my ancestors. But really I’m just interested–especially in the Houghs–in some really interesting people. Perhaps someday I will put all that research together in another novel. The wheels turn slowly.