Living/Loving History

As a kid I was so good at the dentist, never uttering a sound, despite the lack of Novocain.

The reason...

If I were good, I'd be taken to the hardware store that had a shelf of Landmark Books, an offshoot of Bennett Cerf's Random House Publishing. Written by well known writers for kids, they covered different historical topics. It was the beginning of my love of history.

Some people learn about the past from osmosis, never dealing with it directly. Growing up in New England it was all around me starting with the 1694 Parker Tavern,  the oldest house in Reading, MA to the Lexington Battlefield, which is the source of the novel I am currently researching and writing.

I never expected as a kid to be in touch with history far away from my childhood home.

Later in life I was. My daughter spent a year in Germany before university. Her host father told me about sitting outside of Nuremberg and watching the American bombs fall at the end of the war.

A colleague at the Swiss company where I worked recounted how as a little girl of four she was walking with her mom in Evian. She kept dragging her feet, ignoring her mother's cries to hurry. A Nazi officer arrested the mother. Fortunately the war ended days before the mother was scheduled to be shipped to a death camp.

This is history up front and personal, eye witnesses.

I also searched our history...visiting Normandy and other famous sites from many periods. The tombs of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lionhearted, William the Conqueror might contain only a few bones from their bodies are there, but once people I'd read about had been there. It felt like a personal introduction.

Standing where the infant Mary had been crowned Queen of Scots sent shivers through my body.

I'm currently reading In Truth A history of Lies from Ancient Rome to Modern America by Matthew Fraser. What a delight. Unlike many history books the prose is clear often funny, sometimes tongue in cheek. It screams the truth of the saying, the more things change the more they stay the same. It made me wonder how much better Julius Caesar would have been if he had Facebook and Twitter.

If the pandemic is ever over, I hope to trace family history in Nova Scotia. I've already been to LaRochelle, France where my ancestor Michel Boudreau (Boudrot) set sail in 1640. I hope to visit his burial place. Maybe meet up with distant family members. Michel produced 11 living children who were also prolific.

In the meantime, it is such fun researching about the weapons, ships, living conditions of British soldiers before the beginning of the American Revolution for the novel.

Oh, we changed dentists. The new dentist not only believed in Novocaine, he did not consider it necessary to dry his fingers on the bib over my non-existent breasts. I was still able to buy a book for good behavior.