Hello there,
This week we began in earnest to get in the practice hours for Driving Kid Number Four, and I must relate to you my most-often-used gif in relation to this process:
I often say that teaching children to drive is as bad as potty-training them, but with the added fun possibility of Accidental Death or Dismemberment or Property Damage.
To be fair, our most recent driving student is very good so far. And also:
The Part Where There’s an Essay:
The Humbling Effects of Good History
During the early days of Covid, I often thought of a story once told to me as a child. The story took place during the days of heavy rationing during World War II. The country was pulling together; people everywhere were cutting back on supplies of food, shoes, rubber, metal, and fabric so that the war effort could continue with all the needed supplies. This meant that you could only buy the rationed supplies with coupons issued by the government:
In 1943 for example, a pound of bacon cost about 30 cents, but a shopper would also have to turn in seven ration points to buy the meat. These points came in the form of stamps that were distributed to citizens in books throughout the war. The Office of Price Administration (OPA) was in charge of this program, but it relied heavily on volunteers to hand out the ration books and explain the system to consumers and merchants. By the end of the war, about 5,600 local rationing boards staffed by over 100,000 citizen volunteers were administering the program.
The rationing continued for three years; restrictions on sugar lasted for five.
It was during this time that a woman I knew was engaged and had to plan a wedding. She scrimped and saved up ration coupons over the course of months to be able to purchase what was needed.
In particularly short supply in her part of the country was white fabric. Her bridesmaids were happy to hand over some of their own fabric rationing coupons so that she could purchase fabric for her wedding gown. But the material was hard to come by in central Massachusetts, so she traveled with her mother all the way to New York City, gifted ration coupons tucked safely in her handbag, to buy the fabric she needed.
It’s a tiny story, but a brilliant moment of resilience in one woman’s life. Knowing this story kept me humble as I was tempted to make my own generation’s afflictions -- be they pandemics, political unrest, or others -- the worst we’ve ever seen.
Knowing history -- real history, a history that involves people, coffee without sugar, handmade wedding dresses, popular songs, and average comings-and-goings -- lends us strength in times of trial. It keeps us from thinking that we’re unusually afflicted. It prevents the notion that our generation has it harder than anybody else.
My husband and I were both saddened by the recent passing of our favorite modern historian, David McCullough. He was a giant for our generation, but too few of us took advantage. You might know his voice from the voiceovers from a Ken Burns documentary or the movie Seabiscuit; in addition to his brilliant historical storytelling, David’s speaking voice was warm and inviting, calling you into the stories he was narrating.
What McCullough’s writing captured better than most was his own understanding that in writing about history, he was just writing about another version of the present. It wasn’t history when it was happening; it was the events of the present day, that day.
From his work Brave Companions:
It is a shame that history is ever made dry and tedious, or offered as a chronicle almost exclusively of politics, war and social issues, when, of course, it is the full sweep of the human experience: politics, war, and social issues to be sure, but also music, science, religion, medicine, the way things are made, new ideas, high attainments in every field, money, the weather, love, loss, endless ambiguities and paradoxes and small towns you never heard of. History is a spacious realm. There should be no walls.
We may draw strength from the stories of our forerunners, knowing that people have endured hard things before, and they will again. There is disagreement on this question online, but I maintain that this decade is not harder than the 1960’s were for my parents’ generation. And before them -- world-encompassing wars. The country actually torn in two by war. And on and on it goes1.
These are strange and troubling times, to be sure. But we are not special. History helps us see that we are another generation living in the present, doing our day-to-day best against the timeline of a greater story.
I’m thankful for the life and persistence of David McCullough and others like him, who do their best to write history in a way that it can be remembered. A proper remembrance ought to make us humble.
"I do feel in my heart of hearts that if history isn't well written, it isn't going to be read, and if it isn't read it's going to die." — David McCullough
For the Anglophiles
“The only ways to get to the Old Forge Pub are by sea ferry or by a two-day, 18-mile hike across the Scottish Highlands – a trip that gives new meaning to the term ‘pub crawl’.” Read about Britain’s most remote mainland pub.
Reads & Listens of the Week
You’ve heard me heartily endorse the book You Are Not Your Own. Here is one of O Alan Noble’s original lectures on You Are Not Your Own.
Last week in Charlotte was “false fall;” we had cool temperatures all week long. Those of us who’ve seen it before were not fooled. When it is over 90 degrees in September, I will remember this tree, a kindred spirit, which couldn’t take the heat anymore and just exploded.
Théa Rosenberg asks a good question about appreciating things we don’t necessarily like right away: What is the author/artist trying to do? This wisdom is applicable in spheres beyond music, art, and literature: Whether We Like it or Not
Knowing this story was part of growing up in New England, but it’s not often known outside the region: 30for30 explores The Longest Game. In April of 1981, the Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings played 33 innings of baseball. Among the people on the field that night were Hall of Famers Cal Ripken Jr. and Wade Boggs; they are just two of the voices who retell the story here.
Nor could she help feeling, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination. ― Jane Austen, Persuasion
Indulge me in a small soapbox here: I always experience a good amount of rage but also amusement when a certain former President insists that he is the most persecuted President in all of American history. Is he aware that a few of our Presidents were actually assassinated?