REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK -- Danette Goulet
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Some say childhood is wasted on the young. Mine wasn’t -- I lived life
to the fullest as a kid. I mean, I really milked it.
That is what I always thought, anyway.
But as I sat in a classroom in Corona del Mar this week and watched
students try to imagine the battles of Lexington and Concord and the
start of the Revolutionary War, I began to wonder.
I became increasingly aware that I wasted 17 years of living in a town
steeped in our nation’s history.
I grew up in Concord, Mass.
I always thought my parents’ fascination with our town was odd. To me,
it was just this rather elitist town that was too snooty to allow
fast-food restaurants to build there.
In my own little microcosm of a world, I thought children all over the
country were taking field trips just like the ones I was.
Didn’t everyone go to places like the Old North Bridge, Louisa May
Allcott’s House, The Ralph Waldo Emerson House, Walden Pond and the
remains of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin by its shores?
Yeah, guess not. Sorry.
Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t unaware -- they wouldn’t let us be. But
I just didn’t get it.
I even had the gall to be born on April 19.
I was born 198 years to the day after the “shot heard ‘round the
world” began the Revolutionary War, in the very town in which it began.
And do you know what it meant to me? They had a parade on my birthday
each year. On my birthday (a.k.a. Patriot’s Day), there was no work, no
school and everyone in the state was off to celebrate.
In fact, my father portrayed a Concord minuteman and played the fife.
Of course, I think all that was required of modern-day minutemen was to
dress as the patriot militia had, march in parades and reenact battles.
But here’s the kicker -- while my mother was in labor, my dad was
downtown in the streets of Concord, playing the fife.
As my mother went into labor that morning, he dropped her off at the
hospital, told her to wait for him to return, and went and marched in the
parade.
He then returned to the hospital for my birth.
If I had a memory of my first blurry vision of my father, I would have
seen him in his knickers and vest, with a ponytail tied back with a
ribbon and a tricorn atop his head.
I was always very proud of the fact that my birthday was April 19, but
once again -- I just didn’t get it.
I would urge youngsters to take in all the history around them and to
really appreciate where it is they’re growing up -- but if they’re
anything like I was, it wouldn’t do any good, anyway.* DANETTE GOULET
covers education for the Daily Pilot.
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