377 days - Blog #7, This day in history or how I avoid my novel by contemplating its context

So, typical to my personal interests, I follow a lot of history feeds on Facebook.  Or things that talk about history.  And yet it wasn’t until this version of August 4^th that I realized so many significant things – awful things – happened on this day.

By so many, I mean three.  By three I mean the grouping resonates as ominous because I have that Irish suspicion thing embedded in my memory.  They were all things I knew happened.  I just didn’t know they happened on the same square of the calendar.

One I already referenced last night and in another blog.  And certainly, the significance of 50^th anniversary makes it more obvious.  Although, in truth… well, come to think of it, I didn’t see this on Facebook this morning. I just happen to remember that this is the day when the FBI unearthed the bodies of Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman.  The bodies were found, but justice never was.

One thing I didn’t realize – or maybe I did in some very distant echo of reading her diary and that last, haunting gripping scene of the play – this was the day when Anne Frank and her family were discovered in the attic and arrested.  That was 70 years ago… so I imagine the zero of the anniversary is why Facebook decided to remember it.  Yeah, I don’t think I need to go too far on that reflection.  Except to say, I have seen that play quite a few times.  And that last blackout with the actress reading, “It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”

Stop and think about that for a moment and thank her for putting that in your mind.

The last anniversary has a zero as well.  Two, in fact.  It is the centennial of when Great Britain joined the Great War.  Granted my nationality doesn’t claim that centennial for another two years… but it was a day that set in motion so much of the consequences of the rest of the century.  And it does, in a very real way, shape the history that made my life happen.

In another Facebook scroll today, I saw a comment feed that lamented how much better it was in yesteryear.  That this generation is lost and lacking in goodness and that decades before were a preferable time in which to live.  I’ve been there.  And yeah, I’m watching Boardwalk Empire or Mad Men and I think why don’t we wear clothes like that?  Or listen to music like that?  Or why can’t we chuck the cell phone mode of communication and have neighborhood block parties or church suppers (even though I don’t go to church)?  Or I walk through the rooms at Beauport and wish I could go to one of those parties – which would probably contradict every argument of propriety from that feed.  But mostly, it’s a nice thought.  I do get to go to those places when I write.  But at night, I get to have a hot shower, watch my latest Netflix binge, check out high school classmates on Facebook and admire whom they have turned into, and be a single, childless woman without being… too much of… a freak.

World War I was so much more horrific than Matthew Crawley’s temporary and conveniently ended paralysis.  It was a stupid war.  An ugly war.  England lost a generation.  The land that no man wanted was scarred forever (look at these photos).  Mustard gas.  Trenches that smelled like sulphur – at least that is how the Imperial War Museum interpreted it – and even if it was a lame interpretation, it makes my soul ache.

And to not be there… but here.  Across the ocean.  Waiting.  Without Facebook.  Without television.  Without a phone.

My grandmother’s father was an agnostic.  Maybe, even, an atheist.  The consequence of which he wasn’t allowed to be buried alongside his wife.  The details of her life are murky because she died when my grandmother was a teenager.  She had hypochondria and maybe something else of mental illness.  Could that have been provoked or escalated by the fact she was a nurse in WWI?

I don’t know.  But even when I think of how they waited for one another through the war… I grieve over the lost opportunity of what might have happened if August 4, 1914 was a different sort of day.

I wonder, sometimes, if after all these 100 year anniversaries pass, will it also pass into oblivion?  Eclipsed by the second war for which this conflict set the stage?  Is it good to forget how awful and just imagine how much ‘nicer’ it would be to live in that yesteryear?

Well, for my year to come, I am writing WWI into my novel.  It is more contextual than plot.  But it does make me think, yeah, no, 1917 was not a better place to live.  No, I hope no one who reads my book will come away thinking that.

Speaking of the book, I should get back to it.  I have six days before I have to declare this draft done and send it off to a reader or two or three.

But, again.  Stop and ponder.  Dulce et decorum est.