What Will They Think?

Years ago, Duane worked on something in the front yard, finished it, and laid a screwdriver in the elbow created by a branch reaching out from the trunk of a tree. He forgot it was there. Then he remembered and he meant to get it, but ... well, he didn't. When he finally did, the elbow had fattened up around the screwdriver so that he couldn't pull it free.

Over time, we watched the tree trunk grow around the screwdriver. I'm not sure when it happened, but at some point it disappeared entirely.

We are a family with many, many screwdrivers in our possession, cheap and not-so-cheap, yellow-and-black, clear with a red stripe, ones with rubber handles, precision ones in a little plastic box, etc. So, the truth is, he never really missed that screwdriver. He probably bought a new set to replace it. We had some years there where he and I had a noisily unspoken competition going between books, which I bought, and tools, which he did.

When we did some work in the house, and later, when Duane and the boys built my office in the garage, we had lots of open walls. We put newspapers in a few of them, and I think a few more things related to the time. We also found a few newspapers from the previous remodeling of our house. No real news, but the prices on groceries in the ads wouldn't buy the bags we shop with today. I saw patterns for sale in the newspapers, Billy Graham prayers, and comics.

Many, many time capsules were buried or put in other safe places during the bicentennial year, at the turn of the century, and this year, the country's 250th birthday. There are cornerstones on old buildings with the date and sometimes cryptic messages carved into their surfaces. I wonder what the people who open these will say. What is this, for heaven's sake? Why would they save that? Can anyone read this?--I think it's cursive, kind of like the hieroglyphics of that era.

There was a concrete slab around the well pump where I grew up. A windmill had brought the water up at one time, and the skeleton of it still stood with its feet buried in that rough-edged, stony concrete. Also on that slab were my sisters' initials and probably the date, but I only remember the initals.

Christine Ann died when she was three, long before I was born, and I ache now, thinking of what my mom and dad felt whenever they saw her initials there. At my age, I wonder how accurate my memories of those times are. But I still feel that ache.

I've been to the Smithsonian twice. Both times, it was overwhelming in what it had to offer. It was also, to the best of historians' ability, accurate in its exhibits. Those things were like the nation's initials in concrete. It is important that those initials are not removed, because even if we can't actually remember how native Americans felt, how slaves felt, how women felt, we need tangible things to make us feel what they did.

I grieve even now over a little girl I didn't know and the parents who were so changed by her life and death that I didn't know them as they were then, either. But I'm glad for the initials, for her few pictures as she sat on the back porch. I'm glad to be reminded of what my family history is.

I want to be reminded of our country's history, too. As it really was, not just the pretty parts. I don't want it to be like the screwdriver, buried so deeply in the past that we don't remember what color it was, whether it was straight edge or Phillips, or its size.

As Charley Sutton always says, have a good day and make some good memories. While you're at it, don't bury the bad ones too deep. Be nice to somebody.