Relics of History

There’s a little game I invented to make history more palatable, first for myself, then for my own children. I was never an aficionada of dates and battles, although I’ve improved a lot since I was young, and at least one of my daughters became interested in political fiction as well as fact.

That would be Jean. At some point during junior high school, she took to reading books and soaking up political history. The book, “All the King’s Men,” was her epiphany. I’ll never forget the look on her face when she confronted me about something she came across in school.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” as though she had been singled out for ignorance.

“Tell you what?” She was aghast; I had certainly grieved her deeply.

“About Watergate and Richard Nixon and –” and she recited the names of those involved in that sleazy chapter in America history, many of which I did not recognize myself.

“Were you trying to shield us?” She was offering me the only honorable way out.

The truth was that I was not especially interested in that particular incident, the ramifications of which would throw a long, long shadow down our country’s future.

Somehow I wiggled out of culpability. And she saves her tears for important things now, like comforting little boys with skinned knees.

Certainly I am more interested in history and politics now. It was almost obligatory, growing up in Pennsylvania, where early settlers and roads and churches were woven together in a tapestry caught between the Revolutionary War and the Civil War to such a degree as to keep me bumfuzzled.

Hence the little game. We mark the years forward, right? Someone who was born in 1957 would now be 52. If you had a grandchild who is 10, you subtract his age from the current year, 2009, and the result, 1999, is the year when he was born.

What if we reverse the passage of time and count the same number of years backward from our birthday?

In truth, last December 23, I turned 72, counting forward. But if someone tapped the “reverse” button by mistake, I could be heading toward 1864, the bloodiest year of the War between the States, and a year before the assassination of our greatest president.

My historically minded daughter, now nearly 47, would start with 1962, the year of her birth. Instead of counting forward, however, she’d cross the years backward to 47 years earlier, 1915, the deadly year of the War to End all Wars.

None of this means a thing except perhaps to call our attention to the relativity of time. From 1936 to 2009 – my lifetime, so far – hasn’t seemed much more than the blink of an eye. From 1936 going backward the same number of years would be breathtaking.

Think of the history. Flight began. Communication from the telephone to the Internet. Penicillin and the polio vaccine. Plastic and all its applications. Space travel.

Now comes the surge of optimism for a new day, a new era in America. What a time we live in. I can’t recall when I’ve felt so much a part of our nation’s history.

It’s easier when you know some of the landmarks, like Gettysburg, Carlisle, the Cumberland Valley, Pa. I grew up in the midst of them.

When I was a child, my family visited Gettysburg several times, and then I went to college there. During my childhood, driving to the ’Burg on two-lane U.S. Highway 15, there were scruffy old men standing along the road waving flags and wearing what appeared to be government issue.

I can’t confirm this now, but at the time, we were absolutely convinced that they were Union veterans augmenting their income by taking us, in our car, for tours of the land they knew so well.

Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. To me, however, they were living, breathing relics of the most acute conflict ever to befall our land.

They are gone. Only a few remain, and it appears they will soon have no part in our new America.