When I was in high school, I had Mr. Roseberry for history, twice. Once for World History my freshman year and once for American History my junior year. There are history facts that I will know forever, because of those classes. For example, I can never unlearn that the Moors invaded Spain in 711. That’s with me forever. It’s possible that I was unable to learn calculus because that brain space was already taken with immoveable facts about the Spanish Inquisition.
As a teacher, he believed, believes probably, that history is a living thing, not just something that happened in the past. As such, one of our daily assignments was to look for Connections – those reflections of yesterday that appear in today. They were supposed to be more than mere allusions, or On This Day history channel facts. They were supposed to wake us up to the fact that current events almost always have deep roots in the past, to make us aware that headlines – we still had literal newspaper headlines back then – were deeper than who played who in Friday’s football game. Connections were to show that the Bosnian Serbian War occurring across the world at the same time that I was taking World History was historically resultant of the division and fall of the 700-year-old Ottoman Empire. (Note to self, look up They Might Be Giants’ Istanbul (Not Constantinople) for what would have been a lazy Connection, but a good song…)
Besides Connections, another thing Mr. Roseberry believed in was history through literature. Among others, he read aloud to us A Tale of Two Cities, The Scarlet Letter, and a little book from the 1860s called The Man Without A Country. It’s about an associate of Aaron Burr (who is made contemporary these days by the smash hit Hamilton, of course), who is tried with Burr for treason. 
Found guilty, he rashly claims that he never wants to hear another word about the United States again. The judge takes him at his word, and sentences him to a life at sea, where no one is to speak to him of his country again. Slowly, the man without a country realizes, by its complete lack, what country means. He dies fiercely patriotic, even while he’s spent decades without a word uttered about the country he realizes he loves.
And so I’ve been thinking about The Man Without A Country. I’ve been thinking about Edward Snowden, who I have mixed feelings about, and I’ve been thinking about how so many people threaten to move to Canada every time something doesn’t go their way at home. I’ve been thinking about people who claim that government is rigged and the election is rigged, and I’ve been thinking about all the animosity that seems to bubble up every election cycle, but especially this one, and about what patriotism means, and whether it is made of uncompromising tenets of red, white and blue, or if it’s flexible enough to mean a multitude of different things to so many different people.
I’ve been thinking about the anger and danger and fear that childhood me saw in black and white photographs in history books, and about the nightly news that sometimes I wonder if I should allow my children to watch. I wonder what Edward R. Murrow would have thought about the news that Lester Holt has to deliver every night. I’ve been thinking about Anne Frank and about Syrian refugees. About the books my grandchildren might one day read as part of their American History canon.
On Saturday morning, we wake up in a house, our house, that has been abused all week by our busy schedules, our tired brains and bodies, so that we have to spend hours cleaning up after ourselves, when every week we realize that if we just did a little more each day, we could skip the full weekend press. My daughters can’t clean the same room without sibling war, which leaves them separated, but still with a path of unfair pitfalls.
“But this isn’t even mine,” my youngest protests, looking at a small pile of her sister’s things. “Why should I have to clean up her mess?” And then inevitably I fix her with an icy stare and ask whose dishes I’ve been washing all morning, and how her clothes happen to become clean again week after week. “We all live here,” I say. “It’s all of our mess.”
Because the point is, we’re a family. Sometimes it’s Christmas morning and there’s hot chocolate on the stove and music playing and love flowing so thick it’s palpably tangible. Sometimes we don’t particularly like each other every moment of every day. And sometimes the mess isn’t ours. And sometimes we think about what it would be like to walk away, not for good, but maybe just for the day. To just grab car keys and turn the radio up and disappear down the highway for a while. Maybe not to Canada, but at least far enough to have to stop for gas. Family is fierce, but it’s messy.
Sometimes, instead of words, I think a Connection is more a feeling. But if I had to verbalize it, I would say, In this house, we don’t always agree, and we love, but don’t always like each other every minute of every day. But this is our family, damn it, and we love each other so damn much that on Christmas morning, my heart bursts with it, and on days when I wake up early and see still tiny feet peeking out of a cocoon of covers, I could weep with the beauty of it, notwithstanding that I could also ugly cry at the piling responsibilities of growing children, aging houses and busy jobs, and Saturday morning spent yelling, “I am not going to live like this for another week. We are all going to start doing our part; do you hear me?” Fierce. Messy. In for the duration. But messy. I said that, right?
Because unless we all plan to move to Canada – and I’m not really sure that Canada wants us – it seems like it’s about time to imagine an icy stare fixed our way that says, This is our nation, damn it. We don’t always agree, and we don’t always even like each other, but this is us. It’s our damn mess – all of ours – and so it’s our job to spend Saturday morning – or all of 2017 or the next 20 years – fixing it, whatever it takes to get this house in order again. And if that pile is your sister’s, pick it up.
Except, if it was a Connection, I’d probably leave out the swearing. I don’t think Mr. Roseberry would approve.
24 days. And then maybe Lester Holt can get back to news Edward R. Murrow would understand.
*With apologies to Mr. Roseberry for any historically inaccurate mis-remembering.