“Don’t Know Much About History…”

Before we had Presidents’ Day, we had George Washington’s Birthday.

Even as a child I always thought that Abraham Lincoln got short shrift when it came to presidential birthday celebration – you didn’t, after all, get Lincoln’s February 12th birthday off, at least not if you lived in Massachusetts. (We were no doubt saving ourselves for the better weather, Boston Marathon holiday that is Patriots’ Day.)

So, on behalf of Abe, and a couple of other presidents that I liked an admired – any guesses? -  I didn’t mind so much when George Washington’s Birthday kinda-sorta morphed into Presidents’ Day, even though, in Massachusetts, it still goes by GW B-day.

Good, bad, or indifferent – and we’ve had plenty of all kinds – I don’t think it’s such a bad idea to celebrate the men who've, in the course of human events, taken on the onerous and colossally difficult (not to mention dangerous) job of leading our decidedly flawed but amazingly (so far, anyway) resilient and fortunate nation.

Anyway, this holiday has gotten me to think about history, which, although I don’t consider myself a buff of any sort, I have always enjoyed. And do read about, if not obsessively, at least with some regularity. Mainly, I read U.S. history, mostly, and my “likes” are the Civil War, the Depression, and World War II.

I just made a bet with myself that I could rattle off the names of all of the presidents. I lost – but not by much – and if I’d given myself a bit more time than the 90 seconds I allotted to the task, I’m sure I would have gotten Buchanan, Arthur, and Garfield. (How could I have forgotten Garfield, who was assassinated. Talk about a hazardous job, by the way: 4 out of 44 presidents have been killed in office, which must rank right up there in terms of on the job mortality.) I will admit I was a bit mushy on the order between Jackson and Lincoln, and clearly late 19th century is not my sweet spot. But I did pretty good.

I also know lots of other things about history, and I started thinking about that not just because it’s Presidents’ Day, but because of a bit of fractured history I overheard yesterday while walking through Boston Common.

Just as I was ambling by the Founders Memorial, which commemorates the city’s founding in 1630, I passed a mother with her young son, and overheard her giving the boy – who was about 4 or 5 – an ignorance-is-bliss history lesson.

Although I was some distance from the pair, I could not help overhearing her, because she was using that self-conscious, officious voice that some parents deploy when speaking to their children in public places. (God, I hope they don’t use those voices in private, as well.) You know the ones. They’re from the look at me, hear-ye-hear-ye school of parenting that seeks to draw attention to the fact that while schlubby, run of the mill, every day parents might be telling their kid to hurry it up or stop licking the snot off their top lip, they are taking the time to impart knowledge to their children. Carpe diem: this here is a teaching moment.

What this mother was doing was explaining something about Christopher Columbus to her son.

Now, I’m not accusing her of confusing John Winthrop with Christopher Columbus. Just because she was walking by the Founders Memorial doesn’t mean that her kid was asking her what it was. They could just have been having one of those mid-winter Christopher Columbus  conversations that come up every now and then, even when it’s not October 12th.

No, my problem was what she was telling the boy.

“Christopher Columbus,” she declaimed in her very bestest outdoor voice, “Sailed to America on the Santa and the Maria.”

I thought about hollering out that he sailed over with the Buchanan, the Garfield, and the Arthur the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, but I was moving too fast, I was too stunned, and I just didn’t have it in me to use my officious, pedantic, cranky old lady voice to show her up in front of her child.

And I bet all you had been worrying about on this holiday was whether U.S. children don’t know much biology, don’t know much trigonometry, don’t know much about algebra, don’t know what a slide rule is for.

If their parents are telling them that Columbus sailed the ocean blue on the Santa and the Maria, they ain’t going to know much about history, either.

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Photo from Wally Gobetz’s FlickR site.