StoryCorps helps nail down Grandpa's recollections for posterity

After Thanksgiving dinner, you have some options: Lose consciousness while watching football as your body struggles to metabolize a pound of poultry. Go to the mall for Pre-Black-Friday Doorbuster Bargain Red Tag Sale and pretend you're shopping for other people. Go to a loud movie where improbable beings tear down cities between quips.

Or you could talk to your relatives.

I know, it's radical. But if there are elders about, it's necessary. Old people have the best stories, perhaps because they know they can't be independently corroborated anymore. But life was more interesting, at least as they tell it.

Tell me about the past, Grandpa!

"Well, it was nineteen-aught-twelve, and we were living six to a bed in North Fork, which is down by the Fork River, in Fork County. My father, who was 14 at the time, worked for Mr. Fork, who ran the chopsticks factory, my mother took in laundry. Didn't do anything with it, she just took it in. My, how it piled up. Well, your Great-Uncle Horace, he had just turned 10 and was back from working the gravel mines in Sauterne, and he brought back some of that fancy city gravel for all of us, and that was quite the Christmas.

"Then my mother got the Dutch Shudders, and of course the only cure for that was a trip to one of those saltwater spas where you sit in a tub all day and someone rubs birch sap behind your ears. We couldn't afford that. So my dad, he went to Mr. Fork to ask for an advance on his salary, and Old Man Fork, he squints up and leans down and tousles my dad's hair and says he'd like to, but he wasn't paying him a salary.

"As you can imagine, this was quite a blow. So my father enlisted in the Army to go over to the Great War. He had to lie and tell them he was really 15. He sent us back every penny he earned, and by then eight of the kids were old enough to work, so they went off every morning on a truck to the cannery. Most of them came back at the end of the day but by summer's end there wasn't but 65 fingers among them all. 'Course, in those days, if you had all your fingers, people thought you were putting on airs."

You could buy a recorder to capture the tales of yore, but here's a better idea. There's a new free app called StoryCorps, and it not only lets you capture the stories, it uploads them to the Library of Congress. That is precisely where they belong. It's a grand idea — all these remarkable stories housed in the pre-eminent national archive, waiting for future historians to sift through the tales and add the voices of our innumerable witnesses to the story of our nation!

So let's mess with it.

Let's insert some confabulation into the national records. Let's say someone in 2115 is sifting through the recollections, looking for a theme he could use for a thesis about early 20th century America, and he hears this:

" … but that was Frank, and we all knew his problem with pigs. Oh, that reminds me: One night, I remember it was the Fourth of July 1937, we were out looking for Frank, because he'd run out of the house stark naked except for his garters, and we saw a light in the sky, shaped like a cigar. It went down behind the trees, and these little men got out. They had these black ropes coming out of their heads with fingers on them, and we saw them carrying Frank away, he's screaming like the dickens. We ran home and never said nothing. Next morning, all the cows' eyeballs were gone. Frank showed up a week later, walking with this little hitch in his step, but otherwise the same except he could turn the radio on and off by making this peculiar scream. He's the one who went into politics. Anyway, you were asking about your Great-Aunt Histerine."

Now imagine that experience replicated and echoed in hundreds of other conversations. Not a cigar shape, but a baguette. Not little men with black tentacles, but striped ones. And it's always July 4, 1937. From Maine to Florida to Iowa to Oregon, echoes of the same peculiar tale. Careers would be made explaining that.

It beats one of the StoryCorps app's sample questions, "Do you have any regrets?"

The old folks might pause, get a little sad, and sigh.

"Sure. That second piece of pie."