Capturing Conversations

 

With the holidays fast approaching—and some gatherings already accomplished among those family members with too many invitations to honor in too few days—thoughts of possible conversations to capture come to mind. In my case, I've already had the opportunity to visit with my oldest remaining cousin, who will soon turn ninety two. Whenever he mentioned a family detail I wanted to remember—but was sure to forget!—my husband came up with a way to guarantee we didn't lose it.

Years ago, we might have pulled out a tape recorder to preserve the words of an older relative—until we realized there is no faster way to put the brakes on a conversation than to stick a microphone in someone's face. Something about that technology seemed to freeze up the flow of conversation. People became too self-conscious of what they were saying. Coming to a visit armed with pens and notebooks likewise seemed to introduce a disruptor to the otherwise easy give and take of a natural conversation. So we'd just rely on our memories to reconstruct the narrative after the visit was over.

That was when we had memories that could hold on to details for hours on end. This is not then. For this visit, when my cousin mentioned a detail we really wanted to remember—the name of the author of a book he really appreciated, for instance—my husband simply pulled out his phone to make a note. Because my husband uses voice activated dictation ("Thumbs are too fat," he'd claim) he'd simply open his "notes" app, talk into his phone in an easy conversational manner, then pull in my cousin with a question—"What was the name of that author?" for instance—and transform what otherwise would have been a monologue into a three-way conversation, all captured on his phone, a device we all are so familiar with using.

Introducing the phone's note app into the conversation as an unobtrusive tool the group is using together seemed so much more natural than what so many of us used to try in years long past. It had more of the feel of a team working jointly on a project than an audience riveted on the words of one unprepared speaker.

Thankfully, the days of the cassette tape recorder and its far too obvious microphone are long past. While I'm glad for my relatives who did manage to coax reluctant elders to spill their guts for the requested monologue of their life's story, I've always wondered what those relatives would really have sounded like, rather than the nervous, uptight, hemming-and-hawing amateur performers that they came across as. The conversational give-and-take of teamwork, where the interviewee is actually a working part of the group, rather than the target of its focus, certainly yields a far more natural-sounding impression.

While we may be interested in what our older relatives have to tell us—and they may be just as interested to let us know those important details—approaching the project jointly may be a more satisfying effort for all of us.