Fourth Grade History

 

Day Eight: The ancient structures and the art of Rome. I’m still lost in a fourth grade history lesson. The photos in the old history books, whose paper edges we’d clean with sandpaper at the end of the school year so that they looked like new for the class that arrived in September. Restoration. Make things last.These thoughts tumble around as we step off the metro and are visually assaulted by the Colosseum. It takes my breathe away, it looks exactly like those grainy history book photos except that the sky is blue and when I consider the millions, maybe billions of people who have walked this path, I feel insignificant, in a good way. All these things that we concern ourselves with, will one day be history, a story to tell to ten year olds. Later we see the 5th Century BC Etruscan bronze statue of the Capitoline Wolf with Romulus and Remus and I remember that photo was scandalous to our Catholic school sensibilities. I didn’t care for my 4th grade teacher, a nun with a short temper and a long yardstick, but I seem to remember everything we learned that year. So, there’s that, something else to think about, how trauma excites the memory, and how stories are born.