Forward: Why I Share My Story

This story of my life is being written primarily for my children and grandchildren.  I remember my own father often related events in his childhood and growing-up years.  He would do so at the supper table, or out in the field at coffee break, or when we were working at something on the farm where talking did not seriously interfere with the work.  Some of the things he told us were repeated often, even to the point where we children would rather rudely remind him that we had "heard that before."  But, in the process, we did learn quite a bit about his past, and we had at least some idea of who he was in his own personal history. 

Ed and Hilda Assink

My mother, on the other hand, while she was generally as talkative as my father, if not more so, seldom referred to her childhood.  Occasionally she might say something about what her parents or another member of her family had done, but for the most part, my knowledge of her was based almost entirely on my own experience of her.  My father would occasionally refer to things "Ma" might have done in the years before, but generally he limited his stories to his own youth, leaving my mother somewhat a blank as far as her past was concerned.  What history I know of her was mainly that of her family gleaned from other sources.

If this tendency to tell the stories of one's past is an inherited trait, then, in that respect at least, I definitely acquired my mother's genes.  This is, in a way, unfortunate.  We all have personal histories which help to explain who we are and without a knowledge of which we can certainly not know the person very well.  Nor can we know of ourselves, we who have descended from them, for the story of our parents and grandparents gives perspective in understanding our own stories, perhaps much more than we might ever imagine.  An American citizen is clearly shaped by the history of the United States.  A significant part of who he is has been influenced by the American Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, the Civil War, the waves of European immigration, World War II, and all the other factors that have gone into shaping the life of this nation.  To understand our own lives demands that we understand the life of the nation and the society that have begotten us.  In similar fashion, we are so closely tied in with and shaped by our immediate ancestors--our parents and grand-parents--that if we are to understand ourselves we must know something of their history as well.

It is with that purpose that I write this autobiography.  I have never been a story teller.  Talking has never come easy to me.  I seldom feel the urge to tell about my past, and even when I am questioned about it or prompted to do so, I do not find it easy to give a fluid, entertaining account.  My brain, apparently, is so constructed that it does not evoke readily from my memory a well-ordered story to relate.  I remember bits and pieces which I must then carefully reconstruct if they are to become a story making sense and worth listening to.  This is the kind of thing that I must sit down and think about, resurrect the details of, put them together and set them permanently on paper in a form where they will not slither away again and be lost to a jumbled confusion of past events.

I am including in this story, not only my own life, but some of what I know about my (and your) ancestors and the immediate and extended family of which I was a part.  And then, of course, something has been said about the time in which I came onto the scene.  I am not attempting to tie everything together into a masterful literary production.  My selection of the details included here will not necessarily explain all my peculiarities, weaknesses, or whatever meager strengths I may be able to claim.  To be sure, I have conveniently left unstated some of the episodes in my life which could have claimed a place in this story, and I have included others which are of little consequence.  But everything that is written here is true, at least as far as I can judge it to be.

Finally, my life, to me at least, has real meaning only in so far as it is related to that most important of all aspects of reality:  to God.  This account, will to a large extent, be the story of that relationship:  how it came to be, how it developed, how it has molded me, and, unfortunately, where it has often floundered and failed to reach its healthy potential.  But know, before you begin to read, that this is where I believe that life should be focused, and it is where, at least in my better moments, I have attempted to focus it.  That aspect of my life I have not done a good job of communicating either, and this account then, serves the transcending purpose of relating that dominant dimension of my life.

 So, read.  Enjoy, if you can; learn, if you will.