Touching History

I majored in English Lit but history has long fascinated me.  What was it really like to live in, say, 16th century India under the Mughals.  Or 18th century Virginia.  Or to be part of a gathering listening to the Buddha teach, sitting on the ground (I imagined) as sunlight filtered through the trees.  Like my earlier blog about putting my finger on a map of the world and wondering what lay at that very point, I've wondered about time as well.  But, in doing so, I've found myself excluding my own era as if by virtue of living in it, it's commonplace and not as fascinating.  (Which was Woody Allen's theme in Midnight in Paris.)  But.  When looking at my own life, set in the last two-thirds of a highly energetic century, I see that, in its way, it has touched history.  I needn't pooh-pooh that because 1) it's happened to me or 2) it's happened during my lifetime.  If we all sat down and made a list, each of us could come up with people, places, times where we and those who have been an important part of history have come together.  Looking at it like that, it's sort of exciting.

In making my list, in allowing myself to feel connected to history, I've come up with a few instances that do fit into our times.

There was the time, for instance, when I had the yellow legal-sized pages in my hand that Douglas MacArthur had just written (in pencil) about leaving the Philippines.  I was working in book publishing in New York and was typing them so that they could go off to the printer.  He was living in the Waldorf Towers and writing his memoir, Reminiscences.

Or the time my husband and I stood in a rather small Imperial Palace courtyard in Tokyo with the public audience who greeted Hirohito (with composed applause) when he and his family came out onto their balcony in a 1971 New Year's greeting.  (What made it so bizarre was that I so well remembered the war, or the latter part of it, anyway.)

Or when I found myself outside the White House in 1961 when a smiling JFK happened to drive by (in an open limo, I might add) with a visiting president of an African country in tow.  I remember wondering at the time how he could be so casual, so bullet-proof.  At any rate, I managed to snap a quick photo.

Meeting Edmund Hillary in Kathmandu was another time.  (That was out on the airport tarmac where I was saying goodbye to a friend on her way to Everest country and he was loading boxes onto the same plane.)  As was being introduced to a very personable Indira Gandhi, then known only as Nehru's daughter, when she came to the Santa Fe ranch resort where I worked.  Or having a college friend describe her incarceration in the Philippines as a child during the war ... or a former co-worker his long days in Tehran as one of the hostages--they, who never knew their fate from day to day.

I do not mention these in any attempt at name-dropping but rather in awe, really, at realizing that in my small way, I've participated in history by sharing space with--by "touching"--a few who affected history or were greatly affected by it. I'm still in awe, too, that I was alive when FDR was President, he with his wonderful smile and cigarette holder stuck between his teeth.

My point is to look at what's in front of us.  Yes, it would be highly interesting to have seen Washington riding his horse to Trenton after having just crossed the Delaware.  Or to have known what Cleopatra really looked like.  (Of course, there's a lot of history I'm glad to have missed.)  But I can figure I'm a 20th (and 21st) century lass who can visualize aspects of this time right here and now.

As you can, too, I'm sure.  Maybe you were at Woodstock, served in one of the first Peace Corps groups, or met someone who walked on the moon.  Or maybe you were at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 and heard Martin Luther King give his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Here's that JFK snapshot I mentioned, though on getting it out just now, I muttered to myself, "Oh, rats ... you can't even see him."  Well, I'll include it anyway and blow it up to its max.  Kennedy is in the back seat sitting next to President Abboud of Sudan who's standing.  It's October 4, 1961.  Such an open-car-with-onlookers setting for the President does not exist today and here's the man whose death changed all that.  So history is right here, staring us in the face.