The Big Screen

My church had been in the market for some new technology. We walked in that Sunday morning, and there, in the front of the sanctuary, was the big screen. Everyone was in a sombre mood. For the first time, the songs came up on the screen as well as the hymn books. Some of them were not even in the hymn books; we were going the way of praise and worship. I don't remember what we sang that day. I don't think they were clap along, arm waving songs, though. We finished singing. The announcements were made; the choir sang their selection, the offering was taken. Pastor Gordon MacLeod walked to the podium and gave a nod to the guy in the sound booth.

It was Sunday, September 16, 2001. I had never seen a power point presentation before. I have no idea what Pastor MacLeod talked about. I only remember seeing the photographs on the screen. They were big, much bigger than what I'd been watching on twenty inches. Life like. Real. Like everyone else, I had seen them since Tuesday, over and over and over again: on the television and in the newspapers. If you are reading this, you probably saw them too. They are imprinted forever. 

It happened in the United States of America. We are your neighbors. We felt your pain and cried with you. We opened our doors here in Moncton. Planes lined up row upon row on our tarmac and people from all over the world wondered where they were, and why were they diverted and made to land, and why they were in Moncton, and where was Moncton again, and for how long would they be here? Worried passengers were taxied to the coliseum and matched up with good Moncton strangers who welcomed them into their homes for several days. The same happened in other Canadian cities. 

The question comes up every year: what were you doing? I was at the bank where I worked as a teller, waiting for the clients that normally lined up in a long single file, complaining about the lineup just loud enough to make us feel guilty. Where were they? They trickled in. "Did you hear?" We turned on the television in time to watch the second plane fly into the tower. We did very little business that day; we spoke to our few clients in whispers.

It's a part of history now. American History. World History. 9-11 was an epiphany that changed the course of everyone's life as well as the future of all the countries in the world. We cannot go back. We watch our backs. We are forever changed.

Not all history is a big event like 9-11. Thank God for that. Some history is good, and some is not. I did not like history in school. I think the reason for that is that the history I learned was pretty much limited to the memorization of what happened on what date. 

In fourteen hundred ninety-two 

Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

We didn't learn the reasons: the whys and the wherefores. Maybe some schoolchildren did, but I don't think I did. So, I took the minimum amount of history requirements that I could. And now, I love history. I love historical fiction,  historical documentaries and historical textbooks. I love how it affected my ancestors' lives, whether bad or good. I love New Brunswick history. I didn't really know we had much history beyond the Mi'kmaq and Maliseets and Samuel de Champlain. I knew nothing about Le Grand Derangement and the Loyalists. I had no idea I carried the DNA of seven German families intertwined with the English and Irish strands and one strand of French. What did I learn in school? Geography, I guess. I knew the cities and counties and rivers. Maybe they didn't teach it, or maybe it went right over my head and I forgot it when I handed in my test or project. I remember Current Events, and pasting photographs of the Royal family in my scrapbook, but I did not associate that with history. I wonder now: was I a history dunce or something? Was I off in day-dream land every history period? I learned New Brunswick history when I started researching my family history; or at least that is when it began to stick. 

History is always in the making. It is what happened yesterday, last year, last decade, last century, last millennium. Adam and Eve and who they begat and why did she eat the apple and why did she give him an apple and he ate it too, and did they name the dinosaurs and what happened to them? It is what happened to the world at large and what happened in my little town and in my own house. History is the 40th reunion of the Last Annual Gathering of the Clan. It happened last weekend. It's all over but the memories.  Do some of you remember the First Last Annual Gathering? History is the reuniting of descendants from four of Daniel and Charlotte's twelve children in their home village in July, 2014, after eighty-six years. Good history; good memories. History is our forefathers that served in the Great War, which happened one hundred years ago. It is our children, going off to Iraq and Afghanistan and Turkey and potentially Syria and Ukraine and North Korea and Gaza and back to Iraq and who knows where else. It is Amelia Earhart and Flights 370 and 17 and Bobby Minella's plane falling apart over the North Sea.  And it is sending our children and grandchildren back to school to learn history: hopefully the whys and the wherefores and the whodunits and why we shouldn't let some things happen ever again but we do. It may be awful, but it happened, and it needs to be taught and understood, and not just what happened on what date but why? What have we learned from it? Where did we go from there? And why do we hate and jihad, and how can we fix the messes we've made? Can we fix them? Are we too far gone? 

I do not have the answers to history. Just the questions. So I try to make sense of the lives of the twelve tribes of Daniel Holmes and the sixteen tribes of Charles Joshua Moore and the rest of my ancestors that make up me and you, my cousins and siblings and children.