The difficult task of eternizing the past

I know it's a very difficult task, but I at least started: tell the story of my past.

Why?

But why not?

I start a text telling about my birthplace. This location is named Tujuguaba and is a village within the State of Sao Paulo, near Campinas, in Brazil. The text is still small and full of errors, but once I give it a polished, I will make available to the world, be it with ten or a hundred pages. It does not matter.

But the thing is harder than it looks.

The reason for this difficulty is that I know almost nothing about what happened before I existed. Just I do not know enough to answer my own curiosity, and I see no means of supplying this lack of knowledge.

 

My past before me, I mean, past the place where I was born and where lived my distant relatives, I is not accessible. I left Tujuguaba when I was 14 years old and simply do not have any contact with anyone there. Even with my family. And every day that passes, has more probability that little that remains of that past is lost by the death of people who still have important memories to be recorded.

What can I do? Nothing.

It comes down to deductions based on what I know after I was born and the famous Internet searches. But the Internet is far from offering the ease of research I need for work of this type. The Internet records very well this time, but the past is out of their records.

So I gather crumbs from those which came before me.

Ah, but how would it be simpler if I could just talk to people ...

But that no longer exists.

 

It is true: the conversation is gone. I am a witness of this fact and say with all category this reality. No one else is available for a simple conversation that lasts more than ten or fifteen minutes, more enjoyable or important that it is.

The rush in the world swallowed us.

People have commitments, need to do thousands of things at same time and the dialogue is not part of any list of priorities. Phone calls are expensive, and chats online are not even a shadow of what would be true talk in a  room or kitchen, watered with cakes and cups of coffee on a quiet afternoon in a common weekend.

I will never forget the day I visited an elderly  and widow aunt, and she just disappeared from her home to the street, because he had a "third age" meeting. He ran hastily in search of a dance or something and left us, me and her daughter, brooding recent memories, while she might be telling us beautiful and lost in time stories, inaccessible to Google and MSN and Orkuts and Facebooks of modern life . My aunt just did not have time to talk about the past.

 

So, my record work goes by leaps, and as flawed as an old comb.

I think the best thing to do is ensure that what I experienced personally. It is true that there is nothing as old or spectacular, but I have unlimited access and is an available and reliable source.

I still do not have to run to the dances of the "best age"...