Future Uncertainties and Past Realities

This day has culminated into a series of small panic attacks over various events and deadlines that resulted from one thing - this damn dissertation. This morning Zach woke up at 7:30 and rushed out the door to start his first day working on MSU's student organic farm. I envy his ability to be useful to society. I sometimes have this feeling teaching...but geez, I swear this dissertation will be the death of me! When these panic attacks set in, it's usually a good time for me to realize how quickly everything will pass by, and how fortunate I've been in my life thus far.

I have an album I've been keeping for the past couple of years. It's a collection of photographs I've picked up at antique stores.


The collection is partly a memorial, small, insignificant, and unseen, (but a memorial nonetheless!)to these people. I don't know why anyone would ever want to sell or toss aside these memories of their ancestors, but at some point they did. It probably has something to do with how people handle death when it occurs (or don't handle it). I've been careful to keep the collections together, so as to not mix families. When a new family collection starts, I have carefully labeled it (even though I don't know the families' names).


Part of the reason I keep the album is also to have an idea of life 50, 80, or 100 years ago.

Not an actual idea, but a nostalgic idea. I've been slowly covering my life with objects of the past. It provides me with a reality I'm unfamiliar with (isn't this ironic for a historian to say?)and thus, one that is obviously a romantic illusion. Almost everyone looks happy in these pictures and certainly no one is writing dissertations! Most importantly, people have homes, farms, families, and possessions that are valuable (aka not made in China and shipped to Wal-Mart at 5 for $5).

This has really become noticeable to me after living in Lansing where there's shadows of this past life in the form of paved, abandoned lots and shells of auto industry plants everywhere. These things just didn't exist in the past (or at least people neglected to capture them in photographs). This is such a common site in our city. I hate driving past sites like this just because it's so damn ugly, but I can't imagine what former employees and people that have lived in Lansing for decades must feel.
Below are two of my favorite images from the album

Historical Imagination

When I teach history classes here at MSU I try to emphasize the importance of historical imagination and how to detect it when you are reading a book or watching a film. Since I've started writing my dissertation this past year, I have sometimes grappled with my own use of historical imagination. What is my role as a historian? At what level do I intend to lay out facts and at what level do I consider myself a story teller? There seems to be a fine line and just the right mixture of both when I am writing, although this is something I have not mastered by any means.
What struck me as interesting today, however, was my own unconscious use of historical imagination. Mainly I'm thinking about my family here and how we have interpreted our past. As Sullivans, my family clearly embraces our Irish heritage. People have talked about my Great Grandfather Frank Sullivan's "Irish temper" or Papa's Irish nickname "Mick".
I've done quite a bit of extensive genealogy research to date, and I don't even have a single record of a family member residing in Ireland. Today I traced a line of our family back to Switzerland and even found the name of the boat my Great Great Great Grandfather rode into New York City - the William Tell. But not a single stinkin' connection to Ireland yet.
Of course, it easy enough to explain our interest in Irish heritage - Sullivan has been the name that's stuck with us, so of course we claim to be Irish. But I also think there's a bit of romance in all of this: The working class Irish that were all treated like dirt and still managed to drink their whiskey and do a jig at the end of the day - merry drunks, that's what they were.

How's that for historical imagination?

Here's some photographs from my past's past:

The Wirth Family - my mother's side of the family. My gram and pap are in the back row. Note my gram's saddle shoes. We are very similar in many ways.


Great uncle Jack Foster worked in the coal mines of Western PA


Frank "Irish temper" Sullivan (also a coal miner in Western PA)

A Trip to the UP

I've been out of touch for a while because it's been a very hectic week. Grant proposals, dissertation chapters and approximately 400 essays to grade....

This fall Zach and I took a trip up north to Michigan's Upper Peninsula. I label this under "nostalgia" because all along the UP there were these really fantastic old tourist traps - not new tourist traps like water parks, go-cart tracks, or miniature golf, but small little "mom and pop" stops that were created in the 1930s and 1940s when families began using the automobile as their newest vacation tool - thus began the road trip.

This phenomenon actually goes back much further, really it began almost immediately as the production of reliable cars did. One of my favorite stories in the whole wide world is about one of these early road trips and was published in Outdoor LifeMagazine in the nineteen-teens - although I don't have the article in front of me, so I don't remember the exact date. I do recall that the party of four toured the midwest in their Whiting Gasoline Tour Car.

Unfortunately, I was unable to locate a picture of the car, but these photographs give you an idea of what I'm referring to:





So mid-October Zach and I made the trip north and were lucky enough to stumble across some of these early roadside attractions that were largely in St. Ignace.

There was the Indian Village museum/trading post that once housed Father Marquette's (a Jesuit Priest) mission:
Now:

And then:


We also stopped by Castle Rock. I'm pretty sure that's the same structure that got people out to the rock in the 1920s.
Then:


And now:

On a safety scale of 1-10, I'm giving this one a 1.5
At the summit! We're such brave souls!

Zach is terrified of heights and could not be pried from the flag pole long enough for me to snap a photograph of him:


But it was well worth it. He got to visit Babe the Blue Ox and Paul Bunyon once again (he hadn't seen the two here since he was a young boy):

Time Fades Away

It's good to realize that things have a tendency to pass away quickly, sometimes before you can wake up and sometimes before you're even born.

I've seen a couple of documentaries about Bob Dylan and/or Joan Baez. She's not so subtle about what her clashing view on politics with Dylan is really about:


Neither is he:
Scorsese made an excellent film that speaks to this idea of time fading away - a tribute to the Band's final concert, "The Last Waltz":
I mentioned to my dad once when I first started listening to this rock music from the 60s and early 70s, how much I would have liked to see someone like Neil Young in concert. He mentioned very nonchalantly how he'd seen Janis Joplin and Neil Young in college. This cracks me up.

Neil Young: The first time I heard this song I was sitting in my dad's banjo room listening to records on his turntable. It's one of my favorite songs.

This music is best listened to in a log cabin in the mountains, but you probably wouldn't have electricity to make the turntables spin.

My favorite holiday: here and gone

Halloween provides me with the nostalgia of being a kid more than any other holiday...how else am I to explain my continuing quest to find that Halloween treat Gram used to buy me every year?

GIANT PUMPKIN FACE!!!

I'm glad I still have not outgrown my excitement for the holiday. New additions to the house this year: two tombstones, a skeleton head ghost, a *homemade* wreath, and some garland.




Zach was eager to carve plenty of jack-o-lanterns for trick-or-treaters:




Happy Post-Halloween!!! I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas decorating!