I.  That was a beautiful piece, but I still think that my favorite arrangement of that song is my brother Randy’s, circa 1978:

We Three Kings of Orient are,
Trying to smoke a rubber cigar.
We were loaded; it exploded,
That’s how we got to Mars.

    Last fall, when Dad first asked me to take part in this service, I agreed because it seemed so far away.  As Christmas approached and I thought about what I could say- I panicked a little.  I’m only 33 years old- I’m too young to talk about memories!  Like most people my age, I tend to live in the present, so busy with my day-to-day life that I seldom dwell on bygone events.  I’m too concerned with what the future might hold to spend a lot of time in the past.

II.  My panic began to abate when I realized that I was just going to be Dad’s opening act and when I found this quote by fellow Unitarian writer, Ralph Waldo Emerson:  “Memory is the thread on which the beads of a man are strung, making the personal identity which is necessary for moral action.”

    I know that it is my memories and my past that not only have molded my identity but have also spurred me to moral action.  When I am getting to know some one for the first time, such as when I moved to New York last summer to start grad school and was making friends with my roommate and classmates, I find myself telling lots of stories from my past—trying to communicate through familiar narratives some essential parts of myself.  In the process, these stories comfort me and strengthen me, especially when I find myself feeling insecure in new situations.

III.  Not unnaturally, many of the memories that I find myself sharing most often have to do with my family.  I grew up in State College in the 70s and 80s.  Until I was a teenager, we lived out in Park Forest, across the street from my paternal grandparents, who had moved to PA from Upstate New York around the time I was born.  I recently wrote about them in one of my essays for a writing workshop:

    My grandparents were always creating things with their own hands for the people they loved.  My tall slender grandfather was from a long line of carpenters--there are English streets that bear our last name because Newnhams built every house on the street.  By the time I came along, the youngest of their seven grandchildren, Gramp was busy in his basement workshop with much smaller projects: napkin holders, bed side tables, furniture for my dollhouse.  My grandfather was angles, bongo drums, bad puns and TV wrestling to my Gram’s soft huggableness, African violets, Bible quotations and pinochle games. She was a seamstress who made embroidered flannel nightgowns for every woman in the family every Christmas.  I still have the one she made me when I was 13, four months before she died, its yellow flannel worn thin as wax paper.  Cooking was another way she gave her love substantial form.

    She and I would have tea parties with weak tea or ginger ale, sipped from her beautiful bone china cups and saucers, my six-year-old hands grasping their twiggy handles with studied concentration, happy to be a grown up girl sitting at the sunny table eating homemade oatmeal-scotchie cookies with my Gram. There was a bearskin rug in front of the TV where I would sprawl out to watch “The Muppet Show” and Gram would bring me a bowl of fudge-ripple ice cream.  And there was always a green cut-glass bowl full of caramels on an end table next to the fireplace, close at hand when I ran over for comfort after my Mom had yelled at me for some minor transgression.

    Sundays, my parents, older brother Randy, and I would spend the whole day at Gram and Gramp’s.  While we were at church in the morning, Gram would be cooking the big midday meal. There would be pie from the berries my father picked on his lunch hour, or chocolate pudding with blobs of Cool Whip on top, for dessert. Afterwards we’d take a short rest while to regain our strength to tackle the evening meal:  a light supper of soup and sandwiches (and more dessert), yet I was always drowsily, contentedly full again by the time we tottered through the black cool night, across the street to bed.

    Lingering over these memories today, I think I finally realize how lucky I was to grow up with my extended family nearby.  As I grow into a woman, my life was touched not just by my own parents and brother and friends, but also by previous generations through my grandparents and their stories of their families and their parents and their grandparents.  I loved my Gram and Gramp, they taught me lessons of hard work, of creating things, of loving your family.  Through them, I grew to respect the past as a tangible, personal, loving place.  It was somewhere I felt at home.

IV.  Gram and Gramp weren’t the only extended family my wonderful parents provided for Randy and me; there were two other communities I have dear memories of.

§      One was the international network of my father’s scientific colleagues.  I remember that every Thanksgiving and Christmas of my childhood, we always had at least 20 people at our table, from at least 3 or 4 different countries.  Randy and I helped Mom cook a huge dinner, clean, serve, and host the guests.  I learned at a very young age that no matter what their heritage or language, these men and women would greet me with smiles, would be grateful for our family’s hospitality, and would turn into cut-throat competitors as soon as we brought out the Monopoly board.  Dad especially enjoyed watching our friends from Mainland China shout, “Pay me! Pay me!” whenever someone landed on their property.

§    The other extended family that figures richly in my memories is this fellowship.  When I was living in State College, our UU home was a white stucco and red wood building in College Heights.  I remember sitting in the sanctuary, which was smaller than this one, but just as sunny, with big windows.  I’d be kicking my feet (which still didn’t reach the ground) and staring out at the pine trees instead of listening to the service.  I remember hunting for Christmas trees on Stone Soup Sunday and cutting out paper chains and Chinese lanterns for the tree that went up in the RE building.

    I remember the days with our LRY youth group, painting a mural on all four walls of the Richey’s basement.  It’s probably still there, although the Richeys have moved, so maybe not.  I remember that as a fifth grader, our Sunday School class went to a different church every week: Baptist, Methodist, Quaker, Jewish.  As a kid, I often felt frustrated that we UUs didn’t have a satisfactory answer when the other kids asked, “What do you believe?”  I can finally answer that question as an adult, but it took me a while.

    Today I value my UU upbringing.  In this church I learned to be open-minded, to find the good in all religions, and to follow my own beliefs unfettered by judgments or rules.  The UU focus on social action and my international exposure led me to a job where memories took on a whole new meaning for me.

V.  Before moving back to the East Coast, I lived in Los Angeles for 10 years.  From August 1998 until July 2003, I worked at an international nonprofit organization called Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.  The Shoah Foundation videotapes interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust.  Their visual history archive now contains nearly 52,000 testimonies recorded in 56 countries and in 32 languages.

    For the first year I worked there, I entered information from the Pre-Interview Questionnaires into a database.  These questionnaires were about 50 pages long and covered the interviewee’s life before, during and after the war—as much specific information as they could remember- addresses, nicknames, prewar hobbies, information about relatives killed in the Holocaust, the ghettos and camps where they were incarcerated and the rebuilding of sanity and family after the war.

    Every day when my colleagues and I came into work, there would be a stack of questionnaires about 2 feet high.  The 12 of us would work all day and when we came in the next day, there would be another stack there about 2 feet high.  We entered about 20 a day.  I added it up and during that time 3,600 life stories went through my fingertips into the computer.  Later, as a writer in the fundraising department and then the Publications Manager, I watched about 50 of the interviews and came into contact with the wonderful volunteers at the Foundation, many of whom were themselves survivors.

    Like 80-something-year-old Silvia, whose bright red hair betrayed her past as an actress in Vienna just as easily as the number on her arm betrayed her past as a prisoner at Auschwitz.  Like Sigi, who told me his lucky number was 13, because he was the only one of 13 siblings who survived.  And Boris, who was transported from Lithuania to the Siberian camps by the Soviets, who speaks eight languages, and who every time he saw me coming, smacked his lips in anticipation of kissing me and greeted me by the Yiddish version of my name: “Raizele!”

    And then there are the thousands of others whose names I don’t remember.  The little boy who went to the park one morning and when the sun set, a non-Jewish friend’s mother came for him to tell him that his entire family had been deported while he was playing.  The woman who listed six handwritten pages of relatives murdered in the Holocaust.  The man whose job it was in the camps to remove the gold teeth from corpses.  The Romanian survivor who remembered his father’s apprentice, a non-Jewish tailor, who had saved all the Jews in their town.  The woman who escaped Germany in 1936, but cried as she read the letter her mother sent her from a deportation camp the night before a train took her East.

    And Dario, who is one of the few surviving Sonderkommando.  The Sonderkommando were the prisoners forced to clear the bodies out of the gas chambers and burn them in the crematoria.  Today, you might not guess looking at his tanned Greek physique that this man is 80, let alone a survivor.  But when you look into his eyes, they are full of determination and hold a history of pain.

    These memories I carry are not my own.  I have never set foot in a concentration camp.  Yet when I get together with my young Shoah Foundation friends, we joke that the most meaningful years of our lives were 1939-1945.

    While my memories of my own life can comfort me, give me pleasure, balance and understanding, the memories I carry from the survivors refuse my understanding and ask my passion.  They challenge me, they spur me to do good for the sake of the future, they forbid me from living a self-centered, apathetic life.

    I am a walking repository.  And as a writer I have the opportunity (and hopefully the skill) to share memories, to weave narratives that delight my readers, but also challenge them and encourage them to think about the past.  And to live each day in such a way that all their memories become strong threads to string their beads on.  Memories to build our identities and give us the strength and incentive necessary for moral action.

VI.  There is a song that has special meaning for my family.  Every Christmas Eve after church, we drink tea and eat cookies and read “Eloise at Christmastime”—the picture on the front of your program is of Eloise and her dog Weenie zimbering about.  Then we watch a tape of an old British TV retelling of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.”   In it, a grandfather tells his young grandson about Christmases past.  We watch the grandfather, as a young boy in Edwardian Wales, on an idyllic holiday, and we see the young boy soaking up his grandfather’s memories.

    The film ends as the grandfather’s younger self goes up to bed on Christmas night, with his family singing, “Sleep my Child” in the glowing, gas-lit living room below.  Then the scene shifts into present day as the grandfather tucks in his sleeping grandson, the music fading into the snow that’s gently falling outside.

    In this song, I hear the loving voices of the past singing out their caring, their pain, their tenderness, to us in the present.

    Please join us in singing Hymn #409, “Sleep My Child.”