Break Out the Good Stuff

My brother got married in 1997, about a year and a half after I did. It was quite a day. You should have been there.

As he had been for me, I was the Best Man for the wedding. For those of you who have not had the experience, the position generally entails coordinating the other groomsmen in directing pedestrian traffic toward their seats for the service, keeping the groom distracted enough to get through the pre-wedding part, and then giving a speech at the reception – preferably one that the happy couple will remember fondly rather than drink to forget. It’s an honor.

Another part of that tradition is that the groom gives a gift to all of the groomsmen. My brother gave us each a bottle of Dom Perignon and told us to save it for something special.

I carted that bottle around for nearly a quarter century. It’s come up from its little storage place on several occasions and holidays, and I’ve even carried it with us a couple of times when Kim and I went back to the little B&B in Dubuque where we got engaged, though somehow in all that time we never managed to open it. We’re not teetotalers, but neither is drinking a huge part of our life.

But last night when the four of us were having our New Year’s Eve dinner and celebrating Oliver’s 21st birthday the conversation turned to champagne and from there to Really Good Champagne, and you know – why not. So I went down to the basement fridge where it was chilling, brought it back upstairs, and we opened it up.

It was really good.

You can’t save things forever. All you can do is wait for a good time to use them, and then remember the stories that go with them. And if you can make stories connect to each other, then so much the better.

A Birthday in December

You can do a lot of things in the United States before you turn 21.

You can drive. You can get married without asking your parents’ permission. You can sign contracts. You can vote. You can, if you want, leave school completely and nobody will track you down or make you come back. You can even kill people with impunity under certain conditions, as long as you are paid by the government and wearing a uniform. You can sign up to do that without asking anyone’s permission as well.

You can’t drink alcohol legally on your own, though. We’re odd that way.

But Oliver has now broken through that final barrier and is now legal to do pretty much anything you’re generally allowed to do in the US.

It is a strange thing to realize that your child is no longer a child, and really hasn’t been for some time now. Parents have long memories that way, but the present is constantly tapping on our shoulders and reminding us that it’s there and not to get too lost in the past.

It’s been quite a ride and we’re a long way from where we started, but through it all there are things that haven’t changed a bit.

They never stop being your children, not really.

And they never stop being worthwhile.

Happy birthday, Oliver.

I’m proud of you.

Lunch with the Governor

Every so often the “Something I’ve Done That You Haven’t” meme floats by on Facebook, and I have to say that I always enjoy it when it does.

People are interesting. Even the ones who you see every day. And when friends start to post the things they’ve done, well, what else can I do but settle in and enjoy?

I do this exercise in every one of my classes as well. As part of the first day “get to know you” exercises I ask my students that same basic question – what is one thing you’ve done that nobody else in the class has done? – and see what comes back. I’m always impressed with the things my students have done, and I hope they are too. I post them (anonymously) throughout the semester, either on the board before class or in an online discussion forum for classes at a distance. No guessing allowed. I once had a student ask me why I did that. “Because your classmates are more than just note-taking lumps in the seats around you and you should know that,” I told him.

The fun part of that meme is realizing how much you have actually done over the course of a life. It often doesn’t seem like you’ve done much of anything, really – just one foot in front of the other, day in and day out. But even the quietest life is interesting, and it’s nice to be reminded of that fact now and then.

I’ve probably posted a lot of those stories here on this blog, but not all of them. Every time I think I’ve completely covered my entire existence and there will be nothing left for any future biographer to do but collate and index, I find that there is more. This is, after all, a nice problem to have.

For example, I once had lunch with the Governor of Wisconsin.

Admittedly, he wasn’t the Governor at the time. But I did have him all to myself for an hour.

This was back when I was teaching at Not Quite So Far Away Campus. I was filling in for another historian who had been bumped up to an administrative position, so not only did I spend three semesters teaching in my field but I got to teach Western Civ II as well, which is a course I enjoy because it gives me license to roam freely over seven hundred years of European and American history and spend an entire class period on Thomas Malthus. Even the commute wasn’t bad, especially since I ended up carpooling with a friend of mine for most of that time. The ride is much easier when there’s two of you.

Tony Evers was the Wisconsin Superintendent of Public Instruction at the time – the equivalent of the Secretary of Education in this state. As such he was a member ex officio of the Board of Regents of the UW System – the only one at the time who had not been foisted off on an unsuspecting public by then-Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries). It was, I’d imagine, a lonely position to be in.

At some point everyone at NQSFA Campus got an email plaintively asking if anyone wanted to have lunch in the campus Commons with a Regent, since they were all coming for a meeting of some kind. I figured “why not?” – I’d never met a Regent before, and as an adjunct instructor I have learned never to turn down a free lunch, particularly one that promised to be as high-quality as something that would be served to the Board of Regents.

So I threw my name in.

Not many people did so they ended up divvying out the Regents to individual faculty and staff, and this is how I found myself alone at a table with Superintendent Evers.

It was, I have to say, a fascinating time. He was a gracious companion and an interesting one. He was also clearly the smartest person in that room, which is saying something in that context. The level of detail and the thoroughness of his ideas was truly impressive – I’ve met very few people who can speak in coherent paragraphs, and he’s one of them. It ended up being one of the highlights of my time at that campus.

And now he’s the Governor.

Of course I voted for him. I would have voted for a two-pound bag of carrots if it meant getting rid of Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries). Give me a chance to vote for someone qualified, humane, and intelligent on top of that? I couldn’t fill out that ballot fast enough.

In a state that wasn’t as criminally gerrymandered as Wisconsin, where the opposition party wasn’t as mindlessly fanatic about maintaining its grip on absolute power at the expense of human decency, common sense, and the lives of the citizens they rule over, he might have had a chance to make some necessary and real improvements here. As it is he does what he can in the face of unthinking ideological resistance, and for that I’m grateful.

A Quiet Christmas

We always break out the wedding china for holiday meals. Why keep the stuff if you’re not going to use it?

Like everyone else with an ounce of common sense, we stayed home for Christmas this year. No trip out east to see my side of the family. Nothing scheduled for later to visit Kim’s side here in Wisconsin. Just the four of us at home enjoying a quiet holiday together.

We did our scaled-down version of the “Odd Number of Kinds of Fishes” dinner that my grandmother used to make for Christmas Eve when I was a kid, modernized for convenience and adjusted to things we’d actually eat. Popcorn shrimp. Crabcakes. Spaghetti with clam sauce. It works for us.

There was a family Zoom with the Eastern Time Zone folks, after which we opened presents. And then we played Phase 10, which is the ideal card game as far as I am concerned in that it is interesting enough to keep your attention but not so energy intensive that it gets in the way of food and conversation. It sits right in that sweet spot where all good card games should be.

Today was even quieter. Christmas Day has always been the secondary holiday in my family – a time to relax, have friends visit, and generally not do much of anything. No visitors this year, but perhaps next year. Tomorrow will be still quieter. This is a good thing, I think.

This has been a long and draining year for everyone. We started the year with an entire continent on fire and an impeachment trial, neither of which anyone remembers anymore because so much has happened since. We’ve been living with the pandemic since March here. We’re ending the year with The Election That Seditious Sore Losers Won’t Let Die and with the hopeful news of a vaccine – several, in fact. It’s been busy. I miss the big family get-togethers, but I have to admit that a quiet little celebration felt good too.

It will all start up again at some point. You can only take so long of a break, after all. But for the moment it is quiet. We share a meal with loved ones and serve it on the good plates and we hang out together and talk.

This can be a beautiful world, if we let it.

Maybe someday we will.

News and Updates

1. I had a lovely birthday celebration yesterday, amid all of the season’s hustle and bustle – one of the few times in my life that we’ve managed to celebrate my birthday on my birthday, which actually felt a bit odd. Pleasantly odd, but odd. Friends and family sent me birthday greetings by social media or by phone, sometimes both. Kim, Oliver, Lauren, and I had a lovely take-out dinner of barbecue and – by my request – brownies afterward. There were cards, and I can’t tell you enough how much I loved what was written inside of them. And afterward the four of us hung out at the table for a good long while in conversation. As you get older you realize that all you really want for birthdays and holidays is to spend time with those you love, and it was a perfect birthday that way.

2. Of course now the math has all changed and this will take a while to get through my head. I have no idea how old I am at any given moment – I have long since passed the age when I had that memorized and every year it’s a calculation. Let’s see now, I was born in … and this year is, wait, what year is this? … and I don’t think I’ve had my birthday yet … what month is this? … so no? yes? maybe? … and subtract the first number from the second and … wow, that’s old. It beats the alternative.

3. In the last week I have made a grand total of three cash transactions. From one of them I got one of those 2009 pennies with the Lincoln designs on them, and from another I got a wheat cent. I’m on a roll!

4. Two of my three classes are done and put to bed now, and the third never will be until I pass it along to someone else. My advisees have moved on to other concerns for a while as well. So I’m as done with this semester as I’m going to get. It doesn’t seem real yet, somehow. In a semester where everything has happened from home, finishing up and staying home doesn’t mark any great change.

5. It’s strange to hear that you’re going to be part of someone else’s book. One of my friends is writing an autobiography of sorts – as a guy who’s been writing a blog for a decade I’m not in any position to question this, I know – and apparently some of the things we did back in the day are in it. I am kind of curious to find out how they come across. There’s a difference between history and memory, after all.

6. There is less than a month until we have sane government again, or at least saner government. Are you counting down the days? You should be. If we make it to January 20 with the Constitution intact and the republic still standing it will be the single greatest political accomplishment of the last four years. Seriously – the US Army had to make a public statement recently that they would not participate in the right-wing coup attempt that the sitting president of the United States was discussing with his advisors. That’s not normal. Why everyone involved in creating, perpetuating, or supporting this sad rerun of the Beer Hall Putsch (history, as Karl Marx pointed out, repeats itself – first as tragedy, then as farce) is not jailed and awaiting trial is a mystery.

7. I’m really, really looking forward to the avalanche of indictments and further investigations that will rain down on the heads of der Sturmtrumper and his minions beginning on January 21. There isn’t enough popcorn in the world for that.

8. Speaking of things to make a person merry, I actually went out and did some Christmas shopping today. I tried to go to local businesses since they need the help this year more than usual, and I found a couple of things. I’ll probably go again tomorrow just for a few more odds and ends. People here in Our Little Town are pretty good about wearing masks these days – even the guy standing out on the street corner with the sign asking people to “Honk for Trump!” had a mask on – so there was at least that measure of protection.

9. I recently found a bottle of whiskey in my cupboard that I inherited from my dad. It was open when it came to me, though it was mostly full. We were not teatotalers in my family, but the fact that this bottle has a 1978 tax stamp from Maryland on it does suggest that perhaps alcohol consumption wasn’t our top priority. It’s pretty smooth now. Bottle-aged.

10. We now have LED shop lights in our basement. They’re really snazzy. You hang them up, plug them in, and they just work. They’re also bright enough to land planes by, which is a bit of a change from the old fluorescent lights and could possibly lead to Projects as we are able to see things clearly for the first time, but so it goes. We’re too busy for Projects, so I figure I’m safe.  For now.

And Now We Are Four

I drove down to Small Liberal Arts College yesterday and picked up Oliver for his semester break.

It was a pleasant drive, even with every pickup truck in the midwest stuck in second gear in front of me, and we had a good time catching up on the way back. He’s got a history paper to write still – his semester doesn’t end officially until Wednesday, but since everything is virtual at this point he can do that from home where the food is better and there are cats – and it’s been nice being a resource on such things.

Local Businessman High went virtual over Thanksgiving so Lauren has been taking classes at home since then. She usually camps out at the dining room table because the wifi is better there. Kim and I have our offices for our various meetings and classes, and we all make it work.

And now we’re all home together, for at least the next few weeks.

It will be a pretty quiet holiday, all things considered. We will not be traveling to visit any family or friends this year, though with the vaccines now on the scene we do have hope for next year. We’ll hang out at home and take it easy. The tree is up and decorated. Kim has a project where we’ll plan various Christmas dinner menus from around the world over the next couple of weeks, just to be a bit festive.

We’re behind on the Christmas cards, which adds a note of normality to an otherwise deeply abnormal year.

The Christmas shopping has been hit and miss, and likely will stretch out into January, which is fine. As you get older your list gets shorter anyway and it includes more things that you can’t just go out and buy, and having the family together is at the top of that list. We’ll miss the extended clans – there are Zoom calls being planned to help get us past that, but they’re not the same as being there – and it will be sad not to see friends this time of year. But we’ll be glad for what we do have.

We’re healthy, so far. We’re employed. We’re warm and fed and cozy.

In 2020, even more than perhaps other years, these are enough.

Faces and Names

One of the things I decided to do this semester was create PowerPoint presentations of images to show my classes. We’re all virtual now – just pixels on a screen – and I figured it would be a lot more entertaining for my students to stare at something other than me for the entire class period. I didn’t want these presentations to be anything critical – I wasn’t going to test them on these images, for example. I just wanted them to be interesting.

And they were, at least from what I heard. I asked my US1 class if they wanted me to continue with them after a couple of weeks and they all said yes.

So three times a week I would sit there image-searching the web, looking for things that could plausibly fit into my lectures.

This is tricky in the first unit of the course. There simply aren’t that many images out there for things that happened in the early 1600s, for example, so you make do with what you can find. Etchings. Paintings. Artifacts. Modern reconstructions or restorations.

But as we got into the 19th century, we entered into the realm of photography and it was utterly fascinating – to me at least – to see what some of these people actually looked like. You get used to them as names on a page, as actors on a stage you will never actually see, and then there they are.

This is Levi Strauss, for example. He was a German Jewish immigrant who came to this country in the mid-19th century and made a fortune selling tough denim workpants to the miners who were part of the California Gold Rush of 1849. The miners called those pants “Levis” in his honor.

These are the three candidates from the 1848 presidential election, an election whose main issue was whether to allow slavery in the lands taken from Mexico in the Mexican War of 1846-1848. The entire American Southwest – California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and parts of several other states – were part of Mexico until the US decided they’d look better as part of the US, but slavery was a sectional issue that the Second Party System just could not handle without imploding. So the Whig candidate Zachary Taylor, the first image, ran on no platform at all. The Democratic candidate Lewis Cass ran on a platform of “popular sovereignty,” which nobody understood and he was unwilling to define, so it effectively meant running on no platform either. Only former president (and before that Andrew Jackson’s vice president) Martin Van Buren, running as the Liberty Party candidate, ran on anything approaching a platform, which was to keep slavery out of that land. Naturally Van Buren came in third, while Taylor won.

This was clearly a time before television.

Charles Sumner was a Senator from Massachusetts who gave a blistering speech on the Senate floor denouncing Southern interference in Kansas. South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks beat him senseless at his desk a couple of days later while his buddy held off the rest of the Senate at gunpoint. Southerners lionized Brooks as the epitome of Southern manhood for this, and perhaps he was. It took Sumner three years to recover enough to return to the Senate.

John Brown was an antislavery zealot who was active in the guerilla wars in Kansas between proslavery and antislavery forces and later tried to start a slave rebellion by capturing the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry (then Virginia, now West Virginia). He was captured, tried, and executed. “John Brown’s body lies a’moldering in his grave,” Northerners would later sing, “but his truth goes marching on.”

Dred Scott had been a slave during the 1830s and 1840s, but he had spent a lot of time in the free territories of Wisconsin and Illinois following the Army doctor who legally owned him, back when that was considered a thing. When the doctor died Scott sued for his freedom, since slavery was not allowed in those territories. A St. Louis jury agreed and set him free, but the doctor’s family appealed and eventually in 1857 the US Supreme Court ruled that not only was he still a slave but that no African American could ever be a US citizen under any circumstances. The 14th Amendment exists in no small part to erase this foul decision.

The first official shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston SC, by forces under the command of Pierre G.T. Beauregard, the first image above. The fort was commanded by Major Robert Anderson. Beauregard was an excellent artilleryman, so much so that when he was at West Point his instructor took the unprecedented step of asking him to stay on to help him teach the subject. His instructor was Major Robert Anderson.

Frederick Douglass was one of the premier abolitionists of his age and one of the best orators. A former slave himself, he used his personal experiences to argue a critique of American society that still resonates today.

This guy, though. You have to love a guy as hapless as this one.

Wilmer McLean owned a farm near the northern Virginia town of Manassas Junction in 1861. There was a small stream nearby called Bull Run, and it is here that Union and Southern armies clashed in the first major battle of the Civil War. Northern soldiers – often city boys – tended to name battles after the nearest body of water since that is what stuck out to them, and they called this the Battle of Bull Run. Southern soldiers – mostly farm boys – tended to name battles after the nearest town for the same reason, and they called it the Battle of Manassas Junction. And then they did it again not too long later and the battles became First and Second.

At that point McLean decided he had had enough of battles on his farm so he sold it and bought a nice little house in a quiet little town about 75 miles from Richmond, a town called Appomattox Courthouse. Four years later Union forces under Ulysses S. Grant would trap Robert E. Lee’s army in that town, and Grant and Lee would meet in McLean’s parlor to work out the formal surrender of the last remaining Southern army, and the war was over. 

 

Eventually McLean moved back to Manassas and ended up working for the IRS.

 

You forget sometimes that these were actual people and not just names on a page. Looking at them, seeing their faces, is a marvelous antidote to that.