Connecting to the Past

This is a picture of my grandpa and me.  I was very blessed to have all eight of my great-grandparents alive when I was born.  All four of my grandparents were alive until last March, when this grandpa passed away.  I still see my remaining three grandparents very often.  I have a very close relationship to them.  My children have a close relationship to them.  I realize how very blessed I am to have them in our lives.  We have a five generation picture on my piano.  I realize now how uncommon this is.  I am a "reflector" as I like to call it.  My sweet husband says "over-analyzer", I think "reflector" sounds better.  I have loved history for a long time.  As I reflected back upon my school years (did I also mention I have a really good memory....my husband is SOOOOO lucky!) I realized that history to me wasn't a bunch of random facts that happened to somebody a long time ago.  It was real.  It was real because I had "sources" I could ask about so many of these events from years ago.  The Civil War....went to my great-grandpa (who died at the ripe old age of 102 three years ago, and who I inherited my good memory from) and asked him about it.  Turns out his grandpa was  prisoner of war in the Civil War.  The Depression.....ALL of my grandparents had a story about that.  World War II.....more stories than I could write down (which I did write down as many as possible) from my grandpa who served as Chief in the Navy during WWII and Korea.  The boring stats in the book came to life as I heard these personal accounts from my wonderful grandparents.  Now, as I prepare to become a teacher and hear that History is a "least favorite subject" of so many (to my shock and horror!), I make plans to change that.  The more of a connection you have to history, the more real it becomes.  While I didn't experience many of these events I feel like I did, because I heard the stories from people who were there; who lived it, saw it, felt it.  And someday, I will tell my class (and kids and grandkids) about all of those stories and my own recollection of 9/11, and the recession we survived while unemployed, and all of history that is yet to be written, and it will come alive to them.