If traveling the United States is our family’s schoolhouse, the city of Washington, D.C. is certainly our primary classroom as the city we have visited the most over the years. D.C. is an easy teacher with glorious lessons hidden in towering dinosaur bones, planes suspended from ceilings, and glittering shoes from Oz. Museum curators are master teachers taking cues from mothers who hide the vegetables in ranch dressing or medicine in sugar, for the learning is fun and full of wondrous things that make us marvel and make us curious. Our kids barely feel the history burrowing into their brains making forever connections in the synapses that will fire whenever they seek to understand their world in turmoil or in celebration, in chaos or in order. Of course, having a storyteller guide as a father also makes the learning go down easy.
Short on miles but long on traffic, the drive to D.C. always includes a harrowing historical drama narrated by Chris that leaves the kids mesmerized and begging for more. Classic car stories include Andrew Jackson’s complex legacy, Hamilton’s hardscrabble heartaches, Lincoln’s selfless sacrifices, and Jefferson’s lofty ideals.
The plot and characters are given to Chris by history but as a teacher-storyteller from the driver’s seat, he delivers the goods with hooks and pace, cliffhanging pauses and action-packed sequences, all with a steady thrum toward a life lesson. He intuitively follows classic story structure which as an English teacher I recognize; he builds to a crescendo of shock, mostly tragic, occasionally comedic, and then he glides to a close which always brings with it a hush in the car as each of our three children let the story settle inside them, adding a beautiful new layer to their American DNA.
The past recedes with Chris’s denouement and closing credits, and each child crosses the threshold from the world he has built back to the moving car, the braking tail lights, and D.C. in the distance. For a while, the car is awash with colonists and presidents, battles and spies, pioneers and movements, lost causes and legends. Then, the stories start to bloom into life lessons with themes of leadership, patriotism, loyalty, mistakes, and betrayal as the kids ask questions, mostly, why? And a single story starts to hold a place for universal truths, for wisdom.
Our kids have inherited history and stories from Chris, and they each sift through the collection and choose the people from long ago that will converse with them long after our car rides end, and they are living lives on their own. For Jack, it is Teddy Roosevelt the Progressive Republican whose deep, personal loss of his mother and wife on the same day in 1884 shaped his fists, his heart, and his policies for years to come. Roosevelt, the environmental evangelist, whose belief in being a steward of the land more than 100 years ago will now guide Jack throughout his life and well into the 21st century.
For Henry, it is the sacrifice and bravery of Harriet Tubman and her willingness to put others ahead of herself and her own safety as she built an intricate network of courageous friends, up and down the east coast and across state borders to provide shelter for those seeking our most precious American right: freedom.
For Emma, it is the story of Fannie Lou Hamer: a powerful, beautiful Black woman who refused to back down to the forces trying to hush her righteous fury. Although she loves her father’s stories, Emma knows they lean toward a patriarchal past where many women and native voices are lost. But she is determined to seek them out herself and amplify them in her own way. On many rides these days, she teaches her father stories and he listens and he learns.
America’s past is alive in many cities across the United States, but the insistent din of long ago voices in D.C. with statues, exhibits, memorials, and graves provides wisdom around every corner. On every visit, we try to stay attuned to the stream of heroes and their stories, but there is never enough room for all of it. But the lesson is in the clamor, letting the stories of history clang and resound in our lives that we may be enriched and enlivened by those that have come before us.
I hope our kids will always hear their father’s voice long after we are gone and will remember the stories he gave to them. But I also hope they will walk their own paths with a devotion to learning and thinking guided by the voices of the past even as they make their way into an uncertain future. We hope that we have nurtured in them a deep, sincere love of America with all its beauty and its flaws, with all its dreams and its shortcomings, with all its benefits and its costs. We hope that D.C. will be a constant friend and teacher, and we hope they will return again and again in the not so distant future with families of their own.
amazing!!