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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/23Mbcyc:
*jazz hands* my parents! I know, boring supervillain origin story, but.
They met as re-enactors during the American Revolution’s bicentennial. She was a museum curator, he worked for the NYS Dep’t of Historic Preservation. He was just a nerd, came up with that stuff on his own; she was a legacy, born and raised to be a Total Nerd ™. Her mom, my Gram, was super into genealogy and was also the world’s leading expert on the Shaker community at Watervliet, and her brother worked for Historic Preservation too– my uncle’s job was to assess whether sites were eligible for inclusion on the State Register of Historic Places, so. I mean.
Dad was really fascinated by military history, and so as a little kid I just… read all the books around the house. I probably shouldn’t have read all those primary source materials on the wreck of the Indianapolis and the Bataan death march when I was in sixth grade, but. I’m sort of. Well. I know some stuff now okay.
Some of my earliest memories are of the linoleum floor of the back hallway at the Rensselaer County Historical Society’s Hart-Cluett House, and I had forgotten that until last year when I went in there for some reason and was just blown away seeing that floor. I can’t really describe it but I know I spent a lot of hours grubbing around on it. It’s weird what you forget that you remember.
It’s 37 seconds into this video, and it’s a close-up, so you can’t really understand: it’s an entire hallway that looks like that, and it’s not that striking unless you imagine yourself being probably about 18 months old and sitting on it.
Last summer or maybe the summer before, Mom was on a long car ride with a bunch of us and confessed that as a kid she used to get super excited reading about the French and Indian War and thinking that she was walking on the very ground where these events took place (we were up by Lake George at the time) so uh. I am honestly a lot less into history than the rest of my family.
I think I’ve mentioned on here that Mom recently wrote an entire book about our small town’s participation in the Civil War. She’s researching the same thing for WWI currently. If I ever run out of fanfic to write, I will give the fanfic treatment to some of the dudes she’s researched. Like the guy who during the Civil War mailed a bomb home to his 10-year-old cousin (that ended well), or the woman who married a WWI veteran who almost immediately died, but left her with a son, who died in a car crash ten years later, and Mom was like oh that’s a shame, wait I wonder if there’s any newspaper clippings about the car crash, and looks it up and sure enough the boy was, wait for it
*riding on the back of a pickup truck that was
* hit by a drunk driver and
*pushed off a bridge onto
* a moving freight train
RIGHT? Truth is stranger than fiction. The strangest part is that of the like seven people in the car, several survived! Not the boy though, that’s a bummer. His mom made it into her nineties though, and Mom realized that she’d actually met the woman, and is super sad now that she hadn’t known any of this story while the woman was alive, because I mean, okay, awkward to ask about, but on the other hand, what a goddamn story.
*jazz hands* my parents! I know, boring supervillain origin story, but.
They met as re-enactors during the American Revolution’s bicentennial. She was a museum curator, he worked for the NYS Dep’t of Historic Preservation. He was just a nerd, came up with that stuff on his own; she was a legacy, born and raised to be a Total Nerd ™. Her mom, my Gram, was super into genealogy and was also the world’s leading expert on the Shaker community at Watervliet, and her brother worked for Historic Preservation too– my uncle’s job was to assess whether sites were eligible for inclusion on the State Register of Historic Places, so. I mean.
Dad was really fascinated by military history, and so as a little kid I just… read all the books around the house. I probably shouldn’t have read all those primary source materials on the wreck of the Indianapolis and the Bataan death march when I was in sixth grade, but. I’m sort of. Well. I know some stuff now okay.
Some of my earliest memories are of the linoleum floor of the back hallway at the Rensselaer County Historical Society’s Hart-Cluett House, and I had forgotten that until last year when I went in there for some reason and was just blown away seeing that floor. I can’t really describe it but I know I spent a lot of hours grubbing around on it. It’s weird what you forget that you remember.
It’s 37 seconds into this video, and it’s a close-up, so you can’t really understand: it’s an entire hallway that looks like that, and it’s not that striking unless you imagine yourself being probably about 18 months old and sitting on it.
Last summer or maybe the summer before, Mom was on a long car ride with a bunch of us and confessed that as a kid she used to get super excited reading about the French and Indian War and thinking that she was walking on the very ground where these events took place (we were up by Lake George at the time) so uh. I am honestly a lot less into history than the rest of my family.
I think I’ve mentioned on here that Mom recently wrote an entire book about our small town’s participation in the Civil War. She’s researching the same thing for WWI currently. If I ever run out of fanfic to write, I will give the fanfic treatment to some of the dudes she’s researched. Like the guy who during the Civil War mailed a bomb home to his 10-year-old cousin (that ended well), or the woman who married a WWI veteran who almost immediately died, but left her with a son, who died in a car crash ten years later, and Mom was like oh that’s a shame, wait I wonder if there’s any newspaper clippings about the car crash, and looks it up and sure enough the boy was, wait for it
*riding on the back of a pickup truck that was
* hit by a drunk driver and
*pushed off a bridge onto
* a moving freight train
RIGHT? Truth is stranger than fiction. The strangest part is that of the like seven people in the car, several survived! Not the boy though, that’s a bummer. His mom made it into her nineties though, and Mom realized that she’d actually met the woman, and is super sad now that she hadn’t known any of this story while the woman was alive, because I mean, okay, awkward to ask about, but on the other hand, what a goddamn story.
