On an amazing and
inspiring conversation between past and future Americas.
A few weeks ago,
I had the chance to take my boys to Plimoth
Plantation (and its related sites, including the Mayflower II on the
docks in nearby Plymouth) for the first time. As that blog post indicates,
Plimoth is one of my favorite American sites, and so the chance to share it
with the boys (for the first of what I hope and believe will be multiple
visits) was something I had long looked forward to. And it delivered, in lots of
ways but especially in a series of moments and images I’ll long remember: the
boys resting on animal skin blankets in the large house at the Wampanoag Homesite;
each straddling a cannon on the top level of the 1627 English
Village’s fort (probably not allowed, but hey, engaging with the past,
right?); and, most memorably of all, our nearly thirty-minute conversation with
a young historical interpreter in one of the Village houses.
The interpreter
was embodying an interesting historical type, a single young man who (as a
second son who was thus not destined to inherit his family’s farm) had come to
Plimoth on the Mayflower to make his
fortune and had found himself increasingly connected to the community’s other
families; when we met him he was making a fire in the home of one such family
whose young daughter was (he told us) ill and in need of hot water. Perhaps
because of his age, perhaps the fact that we were alone in the house with him,
perhaps simply the vagaries of 7 and 6 year old moods, the boys were extremely
interested in what he had to say—they sat down in two chairs in the house and
quizzed him for, again, almost half an hour on who he was, what he was doing,
what was in the home, and many other aspects of life for the Plimoth community
nearly four hundred years ago. I had little to do other than watch, taking in
this conversation between a 1627 Anglo American man and two 2013 Anglo German
Jewish Chinese American boys.
I’m thankful for
far more about my boys, and the opportunity to be their Dad, than I could
possibly express here. But high on that list for sure is my gratitude for the
chance to watch them grow into their own kinds of AmericanStudiers—not necessarily
in scholarly ways (although we’ll see!), but as 21st century
Americans, engaged with every part of their community and nation and world,
past, present, and future. If the Expanding Horizons students about whom I
wrote yesterday offer me one very definite source of hope for our future, my
boys of course offer another—and I’ve never felt that hope more clearly or
strongly than as I listened to their questions and conversation with this
representative of one of the founding moments in America’s past.
November recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. Who or what
do you thank?
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