Kick Me

Recently, I had to do an oral history project for one of my classes. Thereafter, I decided to interview my parents about basically everything I could imagine. This idea found me researching significant events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to formulate questions. In the midst of doing this, I found myself realizing why my parents have such different ways of looking at certain things than I do.

My parents grew up during the Cold War era in rural Arkansas, far away from the stirrings of  potential McCarthy Communists or Vietnam protests. My dad is a Vietnam veteran, in fact, and my mom a former schoolteacher and librarian who, when I say she’s been outside the South in her lifetime, I mean she’s been to Branson, Missouri even more times than me.

The story of my parents has always interested me–I suppose because they’re my parents, and to understand a large part of myself is to understand where they have come from. As a little girl, I would sometimes dig through my family’s old photographs, which often caused my mother to yell at me to stop getting into stuff. As far back as I can remember, I’ve had a deep sense of wanting to know my own history. Perhaps I am selfish. More likely, however, this came from my parents’ own efforts when I was growing up: every vacation was a history field trip. I spent my childhood in ghost towns, graveyards, and archives. When I was five or six, my brother recreated a model of the entire downtown from the year 1901 from Sanborn maps stretched all over his bedroom. This was displayed at the county fair and the town’s spring festival for a couple of years thereafter and I remember having to sit with him and sometimes the rest of the historical association while passersby patted him on the back for his efforts and I asked my mom things like “can we get a snowcone now?” My brother became interested in history the same year that I was born, and our parents quite willingly fostered this interest. In second grade, my brother, then a Freshman in college, came to my class to give a slideshow about local historical buildings and how local history is important, too. The thank-you card from our class hung on his bedroom wall for years until my mother recreated his bedroom into a schoolroom after she started homeschooling me.

In creating questions for my mother, I found myself thinking about how different I’m sure her answers would be to certain questions than myself. Some things, I expect her to not even know about, even though she reads the newspaper from cover to cover every morning and has in my entire memory. Other things, I find myself knowing I would have such a different response because I was a child at the time. For instance: “Tell me what you remember about the Oklahoma City bombing.” I was nine years old at the time of the bombing. I remember thinking that a girl I had been friends with in third grade, LaToya, had moved to Oklahoma and being worried that she had been killed. I remember a special in the daily paper publishing the entire list of the dead, and my mother reading it on the front porch and saying how terrible it was. I remember my sister and I watching firemen carrying burned babies from the building on tv and her telling me that “there’s a little good in every evil; a little evil in every good,” and that no person was completely evil or good, and giving the example that even gang members can be good people and do good things.

I ask when my mother first heard about 9/11. I had just turned sixteen the week before 9/11. It was a Tuesday, and the fair was in town. My dad turned on the tv at about 8 or 9 o’clock and I remember Mom and I watching for a while too. I remember watching the second plane hit on live television. I had never heard of the World Trade Center. New York, after all, was so far away, it was a place only of imagination. Mom and I left to set up our 4-H fair booth, which had a patriotic theme. We won best of show because of this. That night, my parents and I went to the singing at the fair and I remember there being an especial amount of patriotic songs in light of what had happened. I remember leaving the building at about sunset and looking up at the waving flag and thinking that, far away, there were flags flying in New York and DC, too, and far away, people I never knew were dead, dying, and hurt.

It’s strange to think of the differing perspectives of people you’ve known your entire lives and who, for some of these questions, were there with you when you, too, experienced something. One of my questions for my mother is whether she watched the OJ Simpson car chase or trials. I know she watched the car chase because I remember watching it with my entire family. I was eight, and I remember wondering who would ever name their child Orange Juice. I remember my dad being totally enthralled by the whole thing and leaning forward in interest towards the tv. I remember becoming bored at one point and playing on the front porch, only to come back in and find that it was still the same old thing of some car going down a great big Interstate really slowly with a bunch of cops behind him.

I never really thought of how my parents must have seen any of these things, having experienced so much more of life and history than myself. What did my parents think, watching these acts of terrorism and violence? Did it remind them of so many other bombings of the twentieth century? Did it remind them of the turbulent ’60s, when they were my age and every important person appeared to be getting assassinated or otherwise shot at? Suddenly, I find myself realizing quite profoundly that, despite being a historian, my own viewpoints are limited by my youth and my own opinions.