Throughout most of my life, the past felt like a fictional concept. To hear the stories my grandparents told of bygone cars and wars and inventions felt like the aged hard candies of their timeworn tin reaching out to grab me.
As a child, I never envisioned the adults they once were, or the careers they once led, or the strange times they, too, once lived through. Those tales they told were from a different place in time. The faded events felt nearly as distant as the dinosaurs.
Even with my father’s stories, there was a degree of removal. He would tell of the most momentous events from within his life, but there was always a wall of detachment.
I couldn’t understand what it was like to live through the Vietnam War, the counterculture protests, or the flower power movement. However ornate his language or however sober his stories, there was an element of fantasy that always surrounded that place we call the past.
“You can’t imagine what it was like growing up during the Nixon administration. It was like a new front page development every morning,” he would say with the solemn sigh of bad days gone by. I couldn’t quite picture it myself. But watching All the President’s Men at his side, I could at least see the Robert Redford version of events.
But history remained only a loose and hovering idea. It wasn’t until 2016 that my father realized strange times had come again. He could no longer point toward the lows of the past with the wisened knowledge that life moves in peaks and valleys. He struggled to assure me that normal would come again.
He understood it was about time to eat the words of wisdom he spent my childhood spouting. With a flurry of Trump-related headlines circulating the news on a daily basis, he saw that whatever times we’d entered were every bit as pivotal as those he could remember from throughout his own life.
In 2016, the pages of history books began to light up in new colors for me. But they still felt something short of palpable. Tales of revolutionary wars and Neanderthals and lost civilizations remained largely confined to a two-dimensional world of ink and text.
When a pandemic swept the world, that was the year that history reached out to pull me in. My father looked at me with a fear he’d never known in his life as we faced uncertain times together.
“Ben, this is so much stranger than anything I’ve ever lived through,” he told me soberly, unable to quell the tides of an eerie future. My grandfather felt similarly. Through his N-95 mask, he could tell no tales of stranger times. Nearing a century on this earth, he never experienced one single period of such seismic uncertainty.
Even being alive through the horrors of World War II, he admitted that he never endured anything quite so fateful. As political tensions reached a fever pitch, riots broke out in the streets, and close friends were gassed and maced, it was clear that whatever lessons lay hidden within my history lectures were bells now blaring all around me.
History had never been my favorite subject in school. It felt like a language as dead as Latin. There were occasional glimmers of something more when we approached some of Earth’s more interesting eras. But by and large, the words of those textbooks were lessons that lay muted.
They were faraway places and times. I could read about the strife of those distant people, but I could never feel it for myself. I didn’t believe then, as we sat in our class, that we were never immune to the throes of our spinning world. I didn’t believe that those lessons might one day matter. The truisms about learning from the mistakes of the past were exactly that. They were aphorisms I struggled to apply.
In 2020, I realized aberrations can arrive at any moment. I learned that quiet chatter about some virus in Wuhan can evolve into a tsunami that incapacitates the world. I learned that there’s no dinger that dings once a million have died to delineate the history we’re living. The counter keeps counting and new days keep dawning.
As a child, 9/11 was little more than a couple of towers that fell on the news one day. A few years later, I understood it as an event that lengthened airport lines. As an adult, I see it as a day that reshaped the entire world.
No matter how fast our paradigms shift, it’s often a challenge to process the tectonic changes for what they represent. The great leaders and tyrants of history could never stop and sit with the gravity of the days before them. Atom bombs dropped and the same sun rose again the following day — somehow.
As we sit at desks and learn our history, so often we view it as a past completed action. We forget that we’re a part of it. We forget that time never stops and that today’s events will be the subjects of tomorrow’s textbooks.
Each moment is part of a slow-rolling symphony in the making. As history happens all around us, we can listen for the melody.
Suggestion - actually two - for you.
1) Ask your parents and grandparents to give you their family photos. The further back they go, the better. Maybe offer to digitize and clean up the old prints and slides. The equipment to do that costs about $100. Interfaces with your laptop.
Make sure you preserve notes handwritten on the photos. Dates, names, events.
2) Get a subscription to newspapers dot com. It’s free with Ancestry premium version. Start digging, one person at a time. That site only has stuff that’s public domain, so 1929 and prior. Maybe good first check would be 10/29/1929-12/31/1929. What happened to [Family Member’s Name] after the horrific stock market crash?
You’ll find both good and bad surprises about your family members. My best surprise, bar none: My great-grandfather was the only white man who participated in Houston’s 1899 Juneteenth parade.
This will make history come alive for you.
For me, just reading newspapers from 100-150 years ago or more, even when there’s nothing in them about my great-grandparents, is better than a history book.