Trenna’s iPad

Life in 500 Words –
4 Minutes of Fame for Trenna & Greg

Note: The recordings I refer to in this piece formed The Kitchen Tapes series. It starts HERE.

Introduction

The ABC is Australia’s national media and broadcasting service. And on the ABC Radio National station on weekday mornings the Life Matters show has been running an interesting segment entitled Life in 500 Words.

I have listened to quite a few and there are some fascinating stories told by listeners.

The idea is that you write a piece of about 500 words, record it into your phone (MUCH harder than it sounds), and send it to the show. They then do some production work, add some music and some time later it is played on their radio network across Australia.

I Sent One In …

So I had a go, and this afternoon I got an email telling me it will be played tomorrow morning after 9:30 am and after that it will be on the ABC website with the other pieces from the same segment.

UPDATE (1 June 2023): It eventually got aired on Thursday 1 June. You can hear it HERE.

A link to all of the Life in 500 Words stories is HERE.

So that you don’t have to listen to my voice, this is what I wrote.

Trenna’s iPad

Trenna’s story was remarkable.  

Her mother died when Trenna was just 2 years old, her father died when she was 6, but by then she was already in institutional care.

She was separated from her 3 older siblings, was never adopted, and at age 15, despite being good at school, was told that because she would never marry, she should leave school and go to business college so she could get a job and look after herself …. until the inevitable would happen.

I wasn’t surprised then, when in 2018, 48 years later, Trenna asked me to help her record her life stories – “before it’s too late”.

So one day in April, she pushed her iPad aside from where she usually sat at the kitchen bench, and she started retelling me stories I’d heard before – but this time, we recorded them.

We only recorded 24 sessions of her sad, happy, funny, poignant, or gut wrenching tales.  Those recordings are ultra precious to me, but they aren’t, the subject of this reminiscence.

When my wife did pass away in 2020 I had to decide what to do with the stories that were in those recordings.  

I transcribed them and found there were 95,000 words – enough for a book.   But, I also knew that what she recorded, only scratched the surface of her amazing life.

I grieved, and I ruminated, about what to do to tell others about Trenna’s life.  Really, to finish off what we had started that morning in April 2018.

Then I saw her iPad, still on the kitchen bench, virtually untouched since Trenna and I parted ways.  Something that had been used constantly every day had been patiently sitting there, waiting, for me to open it.

I lifted the bright red lid and it sprung to life, now, begging me to delve into what it contained.

I didn’t look up for at least a couple of hours, and then I was compelled to come back day after day.

I was already aware of what was in there, but now it took on a whole different meaning.

Thousands of photographs, dating back to her earliest days, sorted in chronological order and carefully, and often amusingly captioned.

Summary sheets for each year with significant events, births, deaths, parties, get togethers and family conflicts all noted.

Masses of medical records saying what Trenna had said to doctors and specialists, and what they had tried to do to help her.  Too many stories of misadventures in hospitals.

There was also creative writing, travel diaries, concert reviews – endless snippets of Trenna’s life.

That iPad beamed out Trenna’s life.

My wife was an inveterate record keeper, and almost all of it was on that iPad.

Short of a multi volume biography the size of a set of encyclopaedias, there was only one place I could put all that information – the internet.

So I built a website, and each week I add more material from the iPad, or from the stories she told me.

It was that iPad that helped me to see how I could best tell her story. 
It isn’t  life in 500 words, but it IS very close to a life stored on a machine of just 26 cubic centimetres.

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