Yesterday a good friend of ours came over to spend the day and have dinner. We also took advantage of the beautiful weather to visit the garden cemetery  around the corner from where we live. It was a wonderful afternoon, one of the highlights of the summer, and topped off by the meal the Hayfoot had ready for us when we arrived home. Later in the evening she was scanning Netflix for something to watch (having finished our Ugly Betty run last week.) when she stumbled up a captivating documentary called, appropriately enough, A Cemetery Special. The PBS website has a snippet. Producer Rick Sebak travelled the country visiting cemeteries from Boston’s Mount Auburn down to Key West and up to Alaska. Cemeteries are ultimately places for the living and Sebak captures why we feel rejuvenated after visiting these resting places. Here is a 2005 interview with the filmmaker from the Washington Post. If you have a chance, check it out.

It is hard to believe the summer is winding down. I had a lot of fun and accomplished many of the things I set out to do in summer 2012. In these months I focused especially on my volunteering at Governors Island and learning more about the Reconstruction and Gilded Ages. Too often we study the Civil War without focusing on what came after. The same impulse is there in the study of the Second World War, where the interest is on say the Battle of the Bulge but not the chaos and cleanup of Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s. War is precise and offers a clear narrative; its aftermath is messy and full of shabby compromise. Who wants to study that? It is an impulse one must fight against. How much detail does one need to know about the fighting on Little Round Top or the plight of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne?

I came away with a new appreciation for the postwar presidents, especially Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur. I’ve written before about how we too often dismiss these presidents. The tendency is to skip from Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt and his Bully Pulpit. One cannot understand the Civil War, however, without understanding how that generation lived and the decisions they made after the Appomattox. It was very complicated time and one that deserves better. I still have much to learn but I feel many of these figures are no longer the stick figures they always were to me before say Memorial Day.

Enjoy your weekend.

Those who know me know that reenacting is not my thing. Still, I have met living historians who have thought deeply about the Civil War’s causes and consequences, not just the ins and outs of blanket rolling and tent folding. The folks have Thrash Lab have made this film based on a trip to a reenactment in California.

I have lived and worked in Brooklyn for fifteen years now and still very much consider myself a new Brooklynite. Pete Hamill. He’s and old school Brooklynite. Then there is a Brooklyn that goes back even farther than spaldeens, egg creams, and the Dodgers. This Saturday in Fort Greene the Society of Old Brooklynites will be having its 104th annual memorial tribute to the patriots of the Revolutionary War. I will be at Governors Island this day and unfortunately will miss the ceremonies. I do intend to work it in to my activities throughout the day, nonetheless. It will not be difficult, being that the island harbors (sorry, couldn’t resist) so much colonial history. The Battle of Brooklyn is just one slice of the story. One could be forgiven for not knowing any of this, being as New York did a poor job marketing this aspect of its history in the early twentieth century when Virginia and Massachusetts were doing just the opposite. When we think Revolutionary War we think Boston and Yorktown, not New York City. There are some 11,500 Revolutionary War dead buried in Fort Green Park, many of whom had perished on the infamous prison ships in Wallabout Bay. The 104th annual tribute to these individuals should make for an memorable day.

Fittingly it is raining today; the past few years this has become one of the more melancholic days on my calendar. For over a decade until he died three years ago it was on the second Friday in August that I made my annual trip to see my father and step-mother in Arkansas. This day hits me harder than the anniversary of his death, probably because the routine had become so…routine…that I know instinctively how today would have played out were he still here. I would have gotten the six a.m. flight out of LaGuardia, transferred in either Memphis or St. Louis, been met at the Little Rock airport by the two of them, gone for lunch, and then taken the hour drive back the house where I unpacked my small suitcase to settle in for the week. Somewhere in the week we would have taken a sidetrip to Memphis, the Mississippi Delta, Shiloh, or some other place. It was a pattern that began in the late 1990s and continued throughout the 2000s as I passed from the last stages of my youth into full blown middle age. The rhythms were so set that they eventually became unspoken. The one consolation is that my soon-to-be-wife was able to make the trip in 2009 and see, if just for that brief time, a part of my life that is now gone. We take what we can get.

Coincidentally, my trip always coincided with Elvis Week in Memphis. Three years ago I took the Hayfoot to Graceland. Were we there this week, we may have returned to Memphis to see some other sites. Last night I began Peter Guralnick’s Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley, which had sat unread on my shelf for a number of years. This week seemed the appropriate time to get around to it. It makes me feel a little closer to what are rapidly turning into the “old days.”

The best way we can remember and pay tribute to someone is to live happily and productively. Tomorrow begins Civil War Weekend at Governors Island. It will be a fun time, not least because the Hayfoot will be turning out on one of the days. I won’t be dwelling on it every minute, but somewhere along the way I’ll stop and think of those Arkansas Augusts and the times we shared there and then.

A friend sent this to me today. It is educational and hypnotic in equal measure, especially at ten ’til midnight.

(Hat tip Polly McCord)

It is Friday morning. As of today I am off work for the next 2 1/2 weeks, though I do have a number of projects I will be working on in addition to playing tourist here in the big city. For starters, the clock is ticking on a book review now due in about ten days. Before I write the review I will have to, uh, read the book. Still, the Hayfoot and I have some fun things planned.

Right now I am having my morning coffee and listening to Elvis (Elvis is Back) before I take off for Governors Island. It is going to be a special day because a group of Coast Guard brats, people who lived on the island while their parents served in the CG, will be on hand. The idea is to give them a tour and then conduct oral histories. I have been looking forward to it for awhile. Civil War Weekend is next week. Details soon to come.

Checking the news this morning I saw that a cache of baseball cards discovered in an Ohio attic are projected to sell for a cool $3 million. Unlike most cards that showed the wear-and-tear of rugged children’s use in the days before baseball cards became Cherished Collectibles, many of these were graded in perfect condition. When I was a kid we put ours in our bicycle spokes to make the sound of a motorcycle. In a refreshing twist, the extended family have decided to share the bounty with each of about fifteen cousins getting a share of the find. Nice twist on the usual story of what happens when money unexpectedly arrives.

(image/Library of Congress)