Darby Girl's Perspective

  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 s...

I don't normally notice my age, or anyone else's for that matter but something interesting is happening to me and it is thoroughly age related. I have become a fount (or is it font, like print?)of historical knowledge mostly because I was there when it happened. Helping my college-aged daughter with some research, I came across an article about Jim O'Brien . Excitedly, I read on and saw another about Edie Huggins. My daughter has never heard of either of them and couldn't appreciate my story about interviewing these two local celebrities during my own college years. I even drove Jim O'Brien to my school in a musty old car that someone in the newspaper office borrowed from someone else's grandpop. I'd almost forgotten that period of my life, not long enough to even be considered a chapter, more like a non-sequiter that would have been removed by the editor. It was that short period just after high school, before I quit college, when I thought I would live my ...