They didn't come automatically. And I had to choose ones that wouldn't detonate the board, too. American history is full of heroes and villains. It has been my observation that, on the whole, the heroes stand behind the flag and the villains stand in front of it.

Thank you for helping me remember some of the advantages of living in this part of the country.

Next year, in 10th grade, my 14-year-old will study the Revolutionary War for the third time. We live close enough to Philadelphia for it to be a day trip that's one of the curricular tie-ins for fifth graders in the district. A liberty tree around which a Presbyterian congregation stood to listen to their minister read the Declaration of Independence fresh from the Philadelphia printers grew 3 miles down the road from us, and when it died of disease after extensive doctoring, the community mourned. I, as a child, grew up near the crucial but little-known Revolutionary battlefield at Oriskany. My sisters and I used to roll down the precipitous hills on the soft lawn near the monument, but when I went off by myself near the woods, at 5 and 6 years old, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up while I heard men's shouts and screams come from the trees. Battlefields continue to be inhabited, you know.

This coming spring, my fifth grader will study the Civil War for the first time in any depth. Gettysburg is an hour's drive from where I sit, and my husband's family has a summer home in the mountains through which part of Lee's army retreated. Bullets from skirmishes with pursuing Union troops are still being found in the ground and buried in old trees. Upstairs, here, is a family desk, some 300 years old and still in use, that was built on a plantation in Maryland, the work of a skilled slave.

Due to other family connections and friendships, I can sit at one of Grant's campaign desks and hold Walter Reed's ceremonial sabre in my hands. I can walk through the golf course that Eisenhower played when he was at his farm in Gettysburg.

My uncle died in June of 1944 in France. His picture, sepia-toned, a handsome young man in uniform, is one of my earliest memories, smiling at me from the wall of my grandmother's bedroom. (Her gold star pin lay in one of the top drawers of her dresser, never worn. She didn't see the point.) And there's a brass ashtray, very elaborate and unused, sitting on a table behind me. It was made from a shell casing by a German POW.

As I know all these things from their sight and sound, from their texture and even their smell, so do my children. To touch history, to be able to walk among the ghosts, gives one a frisson that makes it real like nothing else can.

The pageant of American history, its glory and its suffering, is something that I take for granted because it's part of my everyday life, and always has been. I understand it in my bones, and see no reason to have to prove my devotion by display, but rather to remember who I am and by what grace I am able to speak my piece, every day of my life. It also prompts me to go to meetings, speak up for minority opinion (lest we allow the tyranny of the majority to crush dissent), and to vote. If all the people displaying flags actually voted and were involved in the governing of their communities -- and we know they aren't -- I would be much more impressed.

To me, all this panoply means very little. We'll see, after the party's over and the decorations are all down, after the serious business of war waged rather than attack suffered truly begins, who understands bone-deep what it means to be the vehicle by which this heritage is carried into the future.

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. [Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, no. 1, December 23, 1776]

I hope you have a good day, Tom.

Regards--
Mary Anne