Duane Bolin

Dr. James Duane Bolin is a professor in the Department of History at Murray State University.
He may be reached at duane.bolin@murraystate.edu

Final Exams

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Nothing makes me more nervous during the course of the semester than final examinations. For me, final exams mimic life itself. I think I remember my anxiety as a student years ago; our years as an undergraduate and then several more years as a graduate student; enduring the anxious anticipation and then the fearful week itself. I remember giving up on study group sessions, it always made me nervous when a fellow student seemed to know it all already, or when friends joked and jostled, all slap-happy from too few hours of sleep.

So I would hunker down in my dorm room or in a lonely corner of a library or perhaps at the end of a spring term in an isolated nook outdoors in the quadrangle. There, I would pour over classroom notes, neglected textbook chapters, or stacks of note cards all arranged chronologically or topically. I committed these cards to memory, a practice few students seem to use anymore. And I tried to anticipate essay questions, forming in my mind and in scribbled out lines, a possible plan of attack.

I think that once I was in that zone, that intense study mode, all pepped-up on steaming cups of coffee laced with cream, unshowered and unkempt, eyes glazed over outwardly – but mind active and even burning inwardly. Once I found myself in that state, I actually enjoyed myself… though I would never admit it.

And then when the time came for the examination itself, if I had prepared properly, if I had committed the time required, if I had covered all the bases of textbook reading, note taking, and organization, then it all came pouring out in one mad, exhilarating rush.

Finished, I breathe again, place my pencil on the desk, look over the thing one more time, check my name at the top right of the side of the first page, gather up my book-bag, and unload the examination on the professor’s desk at the front of the room.

Now, on his or her side of the desk, he or she sat reading calmly, sometimes. Or working on who knew what, or simply staring vacantly out over the room. I used to imagine the slight smirk on the professor’s face, or a look of bored but satisfied control. Now I know better. Now that I sit on the professor’s side of the desk, I know that the professor, all pepped-up on steaming cups of coffee laced with cream, is anticipating lonely hours in a coffee shop corner, or all holed up in a home study or in a campus office, pouring over the student’s offerings, administering a combination of justice and mercy, and waiting – like the student – for the summer break: a welcome respite from days of anxious toil, and worry, and busy-ness.

I don’t know which side of the desk has made me more anxious, but I do know this: final exams are like life itself. And I do know this: final exams always presage new beginnings.

Does One Vote Count?

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I went to my polling place and voted in the last election, casting my vote on November 6th at Murray Seventh Day Adventist Church. I voted early before going into my university office for a day of classes, of student conferences. My book, Bossism and Reform in a Southern City: Lexington, Kentucky 1880-1940, documented the life, career and shenanigans, of William Frederick “Billy” Klair, a political boss in Lexington in the first third of the 20th century. A master politician, Clair drew support from both the Lexington “horsey” crowd, the bluegrass, blue-blood elite, as well as his immigrant base of German and Irish voters. “Just call me Billy,” he instructed supporters and opponents alike, when introduced at a political rally or as he was glad-handing potential voters.

In the days before strict rules of voter registration, he advised supporters to vote early and often and he was not above voting the cemeteries. I even found evidence in my research of a dog, a canine that voted in one Lexington election. In the last election I voted only once, but I proudly wore my “I Voted Today” sticker into my classes and during my office hours. I wanted my students to know that I had voted - not which candidates I had voted for - but simply that I had voted. I asked them if they had voted and many of them did, several by absentee ballot or by driving back to their home counties.

We always wonder if our votes really make a difference. I can think of one instance of one episode of Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial where one vote kept him from being removed from office. The year was 1868, Johnson had been impeached in the House of Representatives on 14 high crimes and misdemeanors, including his violation of the Tenure of Office Act. The trial took place in the Senate and lasted for three weeks. The president never appeared at the trial. Toward the end of the proceedings, the senators made it clear where they stood on the issue, how they would vote: for acquittal or for removal from office; all except Senator E.G. Ross of Kansas.

Many assumed that the republican senator from Kansas would vote with radicals against Johnson, but as one eye-witness observed, it became known that he was doubtful. It was charged that he had been subject to personal influence – feminine influence. It became known that removal from office hinged on one vote – Senator Ross’ vote would determine if detractors would have the two-thirds necessary to remove the president from office. Tension mounted as the role was called. An eye-witness report is recorded in America Past and Present: An Interpretation with Readings, a long out of print volume that I still consult. The eye-witness sitting in the balcony stated that “Senator Ross was the sphinx, no one knew his position. The tension grew. There were a weary number of names before that of Ross was reached. When the clerk called it and Ross stood forth, the crowd held its breath. ‘Not guilty!’ Called the senator from Kansas.” Johnson had avoided being removed from office by a vote of 35 to 19, one vote shy of the necessary two-thirds majority.

When the young man in the balcony, a friend of the president, heard Ross’ vote, he ran all the way from the capital to the White House. “I was young and strong in those days,” he said, “And I made good time. When I burst into the library where the president sat with several friends. They were quietly talking. There were no signs of excitement. ‘Mr. President,’ I shouted, too crazy with delight to restrain myself, ‘You are acquitted!’ All rose. I made my way to the president and got a hold of his hand. The other men surrounded him and began to shake his hand. The president responded to their congratulations calmly enough for a moment. And then I saw tears rolling down his face.”

In the case of Andrew Johnson’s impeachment trial, one vote surely made a difference.

A Diffusion of Knowledge

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Each one of us, regardless of occupation, regardless of our station in life, should be a student of history. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson certainly believed it. These founders argued that in America, where we the people rule, rather than a monarch or an oligarchy, it is crucial that the citizens of the nation – those who rule – be an educated citizenry. If the people are to rule then they must be an educated people to rule wisely.

Few people know about James Madison’s and Thomas Jefferson’s Kentucky connections. It was Jefferson who penned the Kentucky resolution in response to the Alien Sedition Act in 1798. And in 1822, William T. Barry, Kentucky’s Lieutenant Governor, and head of an education commission charged with exploring the possibility of appropriations for a public school system in Kentucky, wrote to former President Madison, now back at Mt. Pilier, his estate in Virginia, “Too few Kentuckians remember that Kentucky get out in education reform in the years before the Civil War, long before KERA.” Madison’s reply to Barry’s inquiry written in an August 4th, 1822 letter to Barry was based largely on his friend Jefferson’s “Bill for the General Diffusion of Knowledge,” a bill that Jefferson defended in his notes on the state of Virginia, published first in the 1780s as the only book that Jefferson ever wrote. Notice the Jefferson quotation on the east façade of Pogue Library.

In Jefferson’s book, we see shades of his belief of separation of church and state, when he advised that “instead therefore of putting the Bible and Testament in the hands of children, in an age where their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious inquiries, their memories may here be stored with the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European, and American history. Madison agreed. He assured Barry that, “this is especially the case that relates to the globe we inhabit, the nations among which it is divided, and the characters and customs which distinguish them. An acquaintance with foreign countries in this mode,” he wrote, “has a kindred effect with that of seeing them as travelers, which never fails in uncorrupted minds to weaken local prejudices and enlarge the sphere of benevolent feelings. A knowledge of the globe and its various inhabitants, however slight, might moreover create a taste for books and travels and voyages out of which might grow a general taste for history, an inexhaustible fund for entertainment and instruction.

As a teacher of history, I relish Madison’s description of history as “an inexhaustible fund for entertainment and instruction.” Madison praised Kentucky’s early attempt in 1822 to improve its educational system and he connected education to the wellbeing of a democratic republic. “The liberal appropriations made by the legislature of Kentucky for a general system of education cannot be too much applauded.” He wrote, “A popular government without popular information or the means for acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance and the people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives.

For Madison and Jefferson, freedom and education go together; or as Madison put it, “Liberty and learning, each leaning on each other, for their mutual and surest support.” Why study history? For James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, we must all study history to ensure the survival and prosperity for a democratic republic.

Tearing Down

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Quite a scene is unfolding down below my north facing sixth floor faculty hall office window. I have a wonderful view of the northern tree lined horizon and the only thing that breaks that line clean line of trees is the white copula of the New Clark College, the top decks of Hester Hart and Elizabeth Colleges, the press box and lights at Stewart Stadium and one lone distant water tower. I often spare a few moments time before a class session to gain inspiration from the changing panoply of tree branches and leaves. Another scene unfolds or more accurately is unlayering below my window, however in this scene is anything but beautiful. It is a scene of shattered skeletons, of piles of debris, of ugly unsightly ruin, it is a scene of tearing down. The university is tearing down the old Boy Scout Museum along with all of its various appendages.

Many still remember the still older Murray training school which stood on this site. But now the building that housed the newer school, the Boy Scout Museum before it moved to Texas, and more recently various federally funded programs and even ROTC offices is being torn down to make room for more parking. It is interesting to imagine what buildings or landscaping will be placed on this site in the future. No telling with the university expanding and becoming more beautiful with each passing year. The old sometimes gives way to the new. But sometimes something new is made from something old. Isn’t that how we should consider the study of history? Building something new from the best of the past, from the vestiges of the past.

My family has watched old episodes of the television show, Joan of Arcadia. The show now with all of the seasons out on DVD is a modern version of Joan of Arc. Joan of Arcadia talks to God too, and God talks to Joan, appearing to her in various guises. In one episode, Joan’s mother, an art teacher in Arcadia’s public schools, has designed and art project for her students. She asked her students to bring in artifacts from home: old ceramic bowls, toys, jewelry, whatever they can find that reminds them of their childhood. The students dutifully bring in the items and place them before them on the art room’s work tables. Then the art teacher does something interesting and a little dangerous I think. She gives the students hammers and instructs them to break the objects into pieces. She then explains that she wants them to make works of art out of the broken pieces. They are to glue the broken pieces into collages, using the old broken pieces to create new works of art. When a student questions the art teacher about this madness, she explains the process in simple language. “Just think of it this way,” she says, “you’re using the past to create something new.”

I am thinking of that Joan of Arcadia episode now as I cast my gaze to the destruction site below. I am looking down upon the mess; the detritus of the past. The old Boy Scout Museum is all broken up into pieces of steel and concrete waiting for the dump trucks to haul it away. I can’t wait to see what is in store for the university in the future. As we retain the best of the past and tear down what should by all accounts be torn down to create something new.

Let It Snow

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Why can’t it snow?  Why won’t it snow?  We need a good, deep snow to purify the air, to clear the mind, to beautify the landscape.  I tell people how I yearn for snow, and they look at me as they often do, with a mystified look of disbelief.  I know they are thinking about icy, slushy roads, cleaning off windshields, shoveling walks and driveways, and those piles of scarves, coats, and wet socks and boots at the back door.

Instead, I choose to remember the delicious experience of a teenager, rolling over to listen to a local station on a bedside radio, the announcer reeling off school closings, in alphabetical order, schools called off for the day or if we were lucky, even longer.  My high school was Webster County, so I had to wait patiently, expectantly until the announcer finally made it to the “Ws.”  And then, if my school’s name was called, there was no better feeling in the world than to flick off the radio, pull up the covers, and hunker down for an extended winter nap on into the morning.

We were usually called in by the coach for basketball practice, anyway, but these snow day practices were simply not the same as the usual after school sessions.  Exhilarated by the snow, we made it to the gym before the coaches, dressed quickly in an icy locker room, and goofily took the court, playing the fool until the coaches arrived.  We heaved shots from the bleachers, threw basketballs up through the rafters, and tried Meadowlark Lemon hook shots from half court.  Once, the head coach sneaked in and caught us.  He witnessed our shenanigans, and promptly ordered us to the end line for two-and-a-half hours of wind sprints and block out drills.

We really didn’t mind overly much.  When practice was over, we headed out into the fading afternoon to a winter wonderland.  We made circles—cutting donuts—in the empty school parking lot, skidding and sliding around in the snow and ice, before finally making it out to the cleared and salted main highway into town.  Those were the days.
We gathered at someone’s house to eat popcorn and watch television, all the while thinking about the next day.  Had it snowed enough to call off school for another day?  Winter snow days in western Kentucky were so much better than the snowless winters we spent in Fort Worth, Texas.  During our five years there, it snowed only once, if you could call it that, a one-inch dusting that lasted all of a day, a dusting that still produced the all too brief magic of crystal beauty.

In Arkansas in January, 1994, it came a huge snow the day Cammie Jo was born.  We brought her back to our faculty house, stepping carefully across the un-cleared driveway with our precious cargo.  Back for a visit in Kentucky, it snowed one Halloween, and Wesley made a snowman in his grandparents front yard to greet the trick-or-treaters.  Those were the days.

But I remember a heavy snowfall one Easter morning in the 1960s.  We gathered in the quiet hush of early morning for a community sunrise service.  We sang “In the Garden,” as the delicious smells of coffee and cinnamon rolls wafted up from the church basement.  After the service, we partook in an Easter church breakfast.  Then with the service and breakfast over, we filed out of the church into the pristine white miracle of Easter snow.  Those were the days.
 
Now, all I can do is dream.  And here is my dream.  I look out my north-facing History Department window, and guess what?  It’s snowing.  Right now, at least, it is “really coming down,” as my father would say.  As for me, all I can say is, “Let it snow.  Let it snow,  Let it snow.”

Holiday Break

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Oh, the glory of it!  No papers to grade.  No examinations to write.  No long and tedious committee meetings to dread.  No classes to convene.  No office hours to keep.  No scrambling out the door with a cup of juice and muffin to get the children off to school.  The holiday Christmas break between fall and spring semesters is a welcome relief from the tornado of activities and responsibilities that typically make up an academic term.  I realize that there are many folks who must work right through the holidays, and that sometimes it is necessary to work even on Christmas Day.  Teachers work too, sometimes even on Christmas Day, but it is a purely enjoyable work, free of scheduled classes and meetings.

Now, for a brief, shining moment, well, for a few days anyway, one may enjoy a blessed, altered, simplified schedule.  At times, the holiday rush of parties and programs and shopping seem as hectic as any mid-term week, of course.  Still, it is a different kind of rush, a quickened pace with a different, celebratory slant.  I now carry along with me a different attitude, a different perspective, during these holidays, these holy days. 

Oh, there is always the looming semester ahead, with syllabi to make out and classes to prepare.  There are always the neglected reports, more research to conduct, more notes to organize.  But there is also, seemingly, more time to read books saved for just such a time, more time to write—essays that I have longed to get down on paper—and more time just to sit, to contemplate the state of things, just to think.

There is more time to enjoy long neglected simple pleasures:  an unhurried, steaming cup of tea with honey, enjoyed in a front parlor all done up for the season;  a classic film at home in the family room, a lively fire flickering in the fireplace, vying with the television screen for attention;  or a new movie at the theatre, supplemented of course with a large tub of popcorn all slathered with butter and a large soft drink with just the perfect consistency of crushed ice;  a hushed drive through a park to view the spectacle of festive Christmas lights.  We have time or at least make time for receiving these blessings, but there even seems to be more time for giving:  baskets of fruit and cookies for the neighbors, cards to be sent to relatives and friends far and near;  and even smiles for once where worried impersonal glances had been the norm before.

This brief respite from the hum-drum if harried work-a-day world we had grown so used to is exactly what we need, exactly what we must have, to carry us through the mean, anxious days ahead.  And even when those days are upon us we can bank on, even glory in, the few past days of peace and fullness we have surely enjoyed.  Along with Shakespeare we now moan,“These our revels now are ended,” but, at the same time, we can remember and understand afresh the reassuring lines of a Carrie Newcomer song:

Christmas returns, and when it does, we will “take up where we left off when we all meet again.”

Christmas Lights

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I have always associated faith with light.  I have always associated Christmas, the central celebration in my faith tradition with light and lights.  I understand that light plays a central role in other faith traditions too:  the festivals of light, for example, in Judaism and Hinduism.  In Islam, the Quran states that "God is the Guardian and Protector of those who believe; He brings them forth from darkness into light." [2:257].

In Christianity we celebrate Jesus as “the light of the world.”  One Sunday night as a child I walked down the aisle of the James Avenue Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, not just to shake the pastor’s hand, but to make “a public profession of faith.”  This is the way we put it in Baptist life when someone decides to commit to following Jesus.
After that Sunday evening service, my father drove our family home through the streets of Fort Worth, and I remember looking out the window at the night lights of the houses and stores from the back seat of our white Rambler station-wagon.  The lights looked different to me that evening;  in my excitement, brighter somehow.  Even though I was just a small boy, I made a mental note that I wanted to always remember how those lights twinkled so much brighter on that particular evening. Light has inspired the stories of some of my favorite poets and writers.  In “The Loom of Years,” Alfred Noyes wrote:

            “In the light of the silent stars that shine on the struggling sea,
            In the weary cry of the wind and the whisper of flower and tree,
            Under the breath of laughter, deep in the tide of tears,
            I hear the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years.”

And in his autobiography “Two Worlds for Memory,” Noyes wrote about the association of light with the faith of his father.  “If I ever had any doubts about the fundamental realities of religion,” he wrote, “they could always be dispelled by one memory, the light upon my father’s face as he came back from early Communion.” And now, during this Christmas season, we drive around town, through the park, around the courthouse square, through the various neighborhoods, and even out into the country to see the festive displays of lights.  We place strands of lights on Christmas trees in our living rooms.  We see white lights and we see lights of various colors.  It has been a minor point of contention in the Bolin household about whether to string our Christmas tree with the purity of white lights alone (my choice) or with more festive colored lights (Evelyn’s, Wesley’s, and Cammie Jo’s choice).  I will leave it to you to guess which lights adorn our tree.
           
Another one of my favorite writers, Robert Louis Stevenson, knew the significance of light.  He wrote a short story called “The Lantern-Bearers” about a certain ritual of a group of boys.  Stevenson wrote that “toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing near and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull’s-eye lantern.”  The boys hid these lanterns, so that only they knew about them.  “We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat,” Stevenson wrote.  The appeal was in the secret nature of the game.  Only they knew about the light they secretly carried.  According to the writer, “the pleasure of the thing was substantive;  and to be a boy with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.”

Perhaps Stevenson got the idea about the secret mystery of light and life while looking out the front window of his home in England just at dusk, as the lamp-lighter made his way in front of the house lighting one by one the gas lamps along the street.  Young Robert, overcome with the spectacle, called out to his mother.  “Mother, Mother, come look!” he cried.  “Come see the man punching holes in the darkness!” Maybe that is how we should consider the lights that we see on our streets, outside our houses, and in our homes.  Holes of light punched in the darkness of a sometimes frightful world.

Horizons

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On a summer vacation trip to Florida, my thoughts were drawn to horizons.  Each day we sat in beach chairs facing south toward a distant horizon on the Gulf of Mexico.  Unlike Kentucky horizons, disturbed by hills or a line of trees, a straight line of water and sky formed a pristine horizon in Destin, unbroken save for the occasional boat.  One morning, facing south, I scanned the horizon beginning to the far east moving my gaze steadily, but slowly, westward until I reached a point where condominiums rose along the shore just at the point where sky and water met a point of land.  Only two boats, one small, one large, broke the long, straight line.  In Florida, I could only imagine what lay beyond the horizon, although I know from a lighted globe that my family bought for me one Father’s Day that it must be Central and South America, and beyond that Antarctica.

In hilly western Kentucky, horizons are not too distant, unless you are lucky enough to be on a pontoon or fishing boat on Kentucky or Barkley Lake some enchanted evening.  Even level farmlands planted in corn or wheat have horizons broken by a fence line of trees.  I don’t know whether I prefer a distant horizon or a near one, the long view or the short view.  Either way, we often wonder what lies beyond the horizon, what lies ahead, what will transpire in the years beyond what we think will happen in the next few hours or days or weeks.  Of course, beyond this existential moment, we really don’t know.

In Florida, we visited Seaside, that beautiful, planned community of pastel beach houses, inviting front porches, and white picket fences.  At Cammie Jo’s insistence, the night before we left for Florida we watched “The Truman Show” because much of the film had been shot in Seaside.  The movie is about an elaborate television show, the ultimate reality show, centered on Truman Burbank (played by Jim Carrey), a man who was filmed live from birth—no, even before birth—through his school and college years and marriage, all unbeknownst to him. Everyone else, hundreds of actors, and thousands upon thousands of television viewers, are in on the ruse.  The show’s producers plan for him every step:  his wife, his best friend, his neighbors and acquaintances.  This all takes place in a huge biosphere located next to Hollywood.  The show is watched around the clock by viewers all over the world.  Only Truman is unaware that he is the star of a television show, that the script is his life, that each continuous episode is planned out.  Everyone else knows the script, as much as it can be known.  Only Truman is in the dark.

Finally, as an adult, Truman catches on and plans his escape on a boat, only to have his boat, after a manufactured storm at sea, bump into the wall of the biosphere.  In the end, Truman steps out a door into . . . well, he doesn’t know.  He chooses the unknown for the known, the planned, made up (for him) world he has lived in since conception. Isn’t that the way we would have it?  If we could, would we want to know how our lives pan out?  Would we want to have the ability to see into the future?  Would we want to see beyond the horizon?  I suspect not.  As daunting, as scary, as the future may be, when it comes to the future, we prefer the unknown to the known.  Along with Truman, we would reject a life lived as if going through the motions, according to a script that everyone knows, even ourselves.  For people of faith, we prefer the old sanctified truth:  We don’t know what the future may hold, but we know who holds the future.

"RE-Membering"

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We seek to understand the past, to make connections with the past, to make sense of the past.  Individuals and groups, long left out of our textbook histories, have now found a voice in the so-called “new history.”  It seems that the writing of history has been rendered in increasingly fragmented segments.  Writing for the “New York Times” on 26 August 2000, David Oshinsky called the discipline of history the “Humpty Dumpty of Scholarship.”  “History has broken into pieces,” Oshinsky wrote.According to Oshinsky, “by the 1980’s an explosion of historical categories—race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality—had supplanted the more traditional fields of political, diplomatic and intellectual history.  Those formally on the margins of American society now got the lion’s share of attention.”  In my opinion, much good has come from the recovery of these lost voices.  All individuals and groups need to learn from the past.  And we all need to learn from the past of others, especially those unlike ourselves.

I know that I have contributed to this fragmentation of the past in my own history classes.  In addition to American History, I also teach classes in Kentucky History, Sports History, and Teaching History.  Within those classes my students often discuss social history, political history, diplomatic history, military history, intellectual history, and economic history.  We discuss the history of women, the history of various racial and ethnic groups, the history of art and science and religion.  All of these histories have a place at the history table.  All of these voices must be heard. Still, there is a danger in the increasing fragmentation of the past.  What about the big picture?  What about the grand narrative of the historical past?  Oshinsky wrote that “critics of the new history have worried about the fragmentation of the past, with each group telling its own story, on its own terms, in its own authentic voice.  And even advocates wondered at times about the place of these categories in the larger scheme of things.”

I worry about this as well.  Have we lost the ability to tell the story of America’s past, for example, in a way that can be understood by everyone, not just historians specializing in increasingly smaller subsets of the past?  Oshinsky asked the same question.  “So is there a way to combine the diversity and specialization of today’s history with the grand narratives of the past?” he wrote.  “Can professional historians win back a broad audience?” Surely, we need popular historians such as David McCullough, Barbara Tuchman, and Stephen Ambrose who have the ability to make sense of the past for a lay audience.  After all, the art of doing history is really the art of “re-membering” the past.  I want you to notice the hyphen in my re-writing  of the word “re-membering.”  History is certainly about remembering the past, but it is also about “re-membering” as opposed to “dis-membering.”  When we dismember something we pull it apart;  when we remember something we put it back together again, seeing the whole.

I hope that the discipline of history is not the Humpty Dumpty of scholarship.  By remembering the past, we make sense of our lives.  We see how we fit into the big picture, the whole scheme of things.

A Destin Diary:  Day Four

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The skies are still overcast this summer morning in Destin, Florida, but the forecast calls for only a thirty percent chance of rain, so I suppose we will be able to spend a goodly portion of this, our last full day in Destin, on the beach.  Beach boys sell flavored shaved ice concoctions in a snack shack.  What a life they must lead!  They spend their days from early morning to late afternoon on a beach.  No business suits, just shorts and shades.  I suppose they live here year ‘round, but they could be college students who, shunning a high stakes internship, have chosen to spend a summer in a more relaxed environment.  Before the day is through I will try to ask them about home.

Home.  We cherish home, but at the same time we are bound to wonder if we have chosen to live in the place we were meant to live.  When we travel to some vacation destination we always wonder about the “natives” of the place.  In the restaurants and the shops, are any of those folks locals, or are they all from afar, vacationing here for a few days before returning to their homes in Ohio or Minnesota or Kentucky?  Does anyone really live here?  We asked around, and sure enough—hard to imagine—there are families who call Destin home.  We even saw a low, long brick building with a sign that proclaimed “Destin Middle School.”

Of course, we know of several couples in Murray who spend several winter months each year in some Florida locale, south of the snow and slush.  They maintain these second vacation places, but they still call Murray home.  Evelyn and I and our children have come to call Murray home.  Evelyn grew up living in Calvert City, in one place since she was two years old.  My family moved from place to place in the following order:  Arlington, Kentucky;  Jefferson City, Tennessee;  Fort Worth, Texas;  Oregon City, Oregon (for two months);  College Grove, Tennessee;  Parsons, Tennessee; and then, Dixon, Kentucky.

I lived at three different colleges:  Belmont University in Nashville;  Baylor University in Waco, Texas;  and the University of Kentucky in Lexington.  Since Evelyn and I married, we have lived in six different houses:  three in Providence, Kentucky (where Wesley was born down the road in Henderson);  one in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas (where Cammie Jo was born in nearby Jonesboro);  and two in Murray.  We have lived the longest in Murray, now going on twelve years.
           
All of these places!  I remember that when we decided to leave Kentucky for Arkansas in 1992, I went to tell the president of Madisonville Community College, where I then taught, about our decision to move.  I expressed concern that we would be leaving the only home that Wesley, then at four years old, had ever known.  The wise president assured me that home for Wesley would always be in his father’s arms.  We know that in a few more weeks Wesley will be leaving home for college—all the way to Yale in New Haven, Connecticut—and then in five years it will be time for Cammie Jo’s college years as well.  We also know that beyond college they both will eventually establish homes of their own.  Evelyn and I hope and pray, though, that for Wesley and Cammie Jo, they will always feel at home in their parent’s arms.
           
Well, so much for this Destin Diary.  Tomorrow, we head back to Murray, or as the southern writer Willie Morris put it, “north toward home.”  I never got around to asking those beach boys about their homes.  I bet though, for them as for all of us, the old cliché holds true:  Home is where the heart is.

A Destin Diary:  Day Three

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Writing at the beach is a rather free form exercise, and one that I enjoy. It’s not exactly stream of consciousness, like James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” but freewheeling thoughts do flow, remembrances of times past; future hopes.
My view from our patio overlooks the Gulf of Mexico, which I know empties into the Atlantic Ocean yet is hemmed by South, Central, and North America. But from my patio view no land appears. The vastness of the Gulf seems unfathomable; almost overwhelming, much like time and history as they, too, appear to be contained only within the pages of a history textbook. But to actually experience time and history, to live it, sometimes seems unfathomable, too.

The poet T. S. Eliot captured the idea of this notion in the “Burnt Norton” portion of his “Four Quartets:”

One link that I have found that ties time and history; past and present, is teaching. Sitting here overlooking the Gulf I get the sense of what Eliot tried to convey. Other writers have grappled with the enormity of time, space, place and history. The southern writer Pat Conroy wrote that “the water is wide,” and sitting here looking out at the endless horizon with Central and South America beyond, Conroy’s statement certainly rings true. The water is indeed wide.

In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that there was “water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.”  We need not drink the Gulf water, although yesterday I swallowed more than I needed of the salty stuff. But if we look carefully it is amazing what we will find, as Henry David Thoreau observed.
Thoreau wrote that “time is but the stream I go fishing in.  I drink at it, but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is.  It’s thin current slides away, but eternity remains.”  Indeed it does.  Another writer suggested that what matters is that we, while fishing, come up with some surprises.

We all confess to being bored from time to time; but observers, those who really look, will find surprises:  Interesting, heart rending, fascinating things.  That is, after all, what teaching and learning are all about.  As Walker Percy, another southern writer, suggested, “The teacher says `Look!’  The student says, `Yes!  I see.’”

A Destin Diary:  Day Two

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On this morning on vacation in Destin, Florida, we woke to the sight and sound of the breaking surf.  Looking out at the Gulf of Mexico reminds me of the first time I saw the gulf.  With my father in seminary, my family spent five years in Fort Worth, Texas from 1960 to 1965.  Each summer we took a short vacation, it seemed, either to Six Flags Over Texas or to the Alamo.  The Texas heroes of the Alamo became my personal heroes—James Bowie, Sam Houston, Colonel William Barret Travis, and especially Davy Crockett.

As a boy I once wrote a letter to the director of the Alamo, telling him of my interest, and he sent back all manner of copied letters and memorabilia about those Texans who had died there.  In our backyard I took a stick and dramatically scratched a line in the dirt, imagining how Colonel Travis had drawn a line in the sand, inviting all those Texas freedom fighters wishing to stay and defend the Alamo—and to die—to cross the line.  Everyone crossed the line, and so did I.

So we visited the Alamo on our summer vacations, but one summer, our mother and father took my brother and me all the way down to Galveston, and that is when I first experienced the gulf.  A chronic worrier, my mother did not allow my brother and me to venture very far into the tide, but I still remember the power and the majesty of the gulf.

We did the usual things, collected shells and built sand castles, while our mother and father watched.  We have photographs showing my mother in a dress and my father in dress slacks and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, watching over us patiently.  I guess they took pictures of each other since neither appear in the same photograph.

Now, by the gulf in Destin, a row of blue chairs and umbrellas have been placed conveniently for guests, and these same gulf waters, albeit farther to the east of Galveston, are as inviting as ever.  I situate myself, thinking that beyond the horizon to the east lies the west coast of Florida, and miles to the west, beyond Mobile, and New Orleans and Houston lies Galveston, that magical place I have not seen since I was ten years old.  But Destin holds a magic all its own.

Much has changed in these more than forty years.  Evelyn and I have a teenage son and a teenage daughter.  Our vacations, sometimes to our children’s chagrin, have through the years tended more toward “academic vacations,” rather than amusement parks and beaches.  On vacation, Evelyn does not wear dresses and I do not wear dress slacks and long-sleeved white shirts.  We seem to read more than we play.  (On this trip, we brought, each one of us, stacks of books from Murray, and we visited a convenient Barnes & Noble last night to procure a fresh stack of volumes.)  Our children have decidedly more freedom than my brother and I had in the early 1960s.

Some things have remained the same, however, since my first look at the Gulf of Mexico.  Today, we seem to have about the same allotment of worries and cares in this new age of terrorism as we did during the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis and everything else that went with the Cold War.  We also, have, and I know this to be true, just as much love for each other, as my mother and father showed to my brother and me all those years ago.

A Destin Diary:  Day One

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To celebrate the end of summer school, we hightailed it to Florida for a short vacation in Destin.  Cammie Jo had been campaigning for the Florida beaches for some time, so we did this for her, to be sure, but also for Wesley (before he went away to college) and also for Evelyn and me.  As part of the celebration I planned to write several commentaries in the form of “A Destin Diary.”  In these commentaries I will ruminate and reminisce;  I will pause and ponder;  I will consider and contemplate.  A Destin Diary for a wonderful summer interlude.

We left out early—well, early for the Bolin family—on a Sunday morning.  Dr. Gil Mathis graciously agreed to teach my Sunday school class, and Beth White covered for Evelyn in her Sunday school class.  As for us, we communed together—with each other and with the Lord—tooling down Interstate 65 in a borrowed van, a new van on loan from Marlin Seaton, Evelyn’s considerate and ever patient father.

With several stops along the way in Tennessee and Alabama, we checked into our place in Destin in plenty of time to dip our toes into the Gulf of Mexico.  Well, Evelyn and I dipped our toes;  Cammie Jo and Wesley dipped considerably more.

This is a beautiful place:  white sand, sky blue sky, darker blue gulf water, convenient and more than adequate bookstores nearby.  The beauty, however, goes beyond the sights of the place.  The sounds are especially intoxicating.  As I write these words—Wesley and I sit on a patio overlooking the gulf, Wesley reading a collection of essays, me writing these words—the rhythmic wash of the surf and the muffled, yet gleeful, chatter of children in the distance, threatens to lull me into a peaceful sleep.  Only a scattering of families and pairs of lovers dot the line where the surf meets the sand.  I see glints of flashlights down the shore to the east, only dim silhouettes of couples to the west.

A late seafood supper awaits, but for just these few brief moments, with pen in hand, I soak up these sights and sounds, and indeed the salt air smells, of this idyllic place.  Gone are the cares of the academy.  Washed away in the tide are the myriad worries, large and small, of the classroom, of the office.

I know that emails wait to be answered, that summer school grades must be turned in to the registration office in Sparks Hall, that syllabi must be put together and classes planned for yet another Fall semester.  But, for now, for these few days, away with my family, away from classroom cares, away to these beaches of Destin, I can ruminate and reminisce.  I can pause and ponder.  I can consider and contemplate.  I can imagine and dream again.

An Odd Shelf of Books

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At the beginning of the summer, we accomplished something of lasting value.  We unloaded a large painted book shelf from the garage, and moved it beside an identical shelf in our family room.  Each shelf will house almost 400 books.  Stacks of books had multiplied around the house, and no space for them.  So we had to haul in yet another shelf.

We needed help.  Evelyn’s mother always said that we were book poor, but now the books threatened to take over hallways, bedroom corners, and almost every table top in the house.  So we brought in the shelf from the garage, positioned it next to its twin opposite the fireplace, and without moving a book from an already existing shelf, lovingly filled all but one row.  We all worked to move the stray books from the floors and table tops from rooms all over the house.  This was a very fulfilling adventure.

I noticed, though, when re-positioning the books, that several of them, rather than being novels or history books, were—now this is scary—books about books, books about the reading, writing, and collecting of books.  One of these books was Anne Fadiman’s “Ex Libris:  Confessions of a Common Reader.”  Fadiman, the daughter of Clifton Fadiman, the writer and intellectual who served as chief editor at Simon & Schuster and then as the book review editor of the New Yorker, confessed that “I have never been able to resist a book about books.”  I am afraid that I am suffering from the same condition, for I have a growing odd shelf of books about books.

Fadiman maintains that everyone should keep an odd shelf of books devoted to the quirks and unique fancy of the book owner.  George Orwell, for example, held “a collection of bound sets of ladies’ magazines from the 1860s.”  Vice Admiral James Stockdale “brought to Vietnam the complete works of Epitectus, whose Stoic philosophy was to sustain him through eight years as a prisoner of war.”   In addition to all of her own books about books, Anne Fadiman keeps an “odd shelf” of some sixty-four books about polar exploration.

Fadiman has books about Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates, a courageous explorer who brought with him on an expedition to Antarctica “all five volumes of Charles James Napier’s “Peninsular War,” an epic study of the Napoleonic campaigns in Iberia.”  Oates was described by a fellow explorer as “a gentleman, quite a gentleman, and always a gentleman.”  According to Fadiman, when Oates arrived at the South Pole on March 17, 1912, and when he realized “that his frostbitten and gangrenous feet were handicapping the rest of the party, [he] uttered the most famous and gallant words in the history of polar exploration:  `I am just going outside and may be some time.’  Then he stumbled out of the tent into a blizzard, never to be seen again.  It was his thirty-second birthday.”

I don’t know what happened to Oates’ “odd shelf of books” on the Napoleonic campaigns in Iberia, but I do know that I can find my own “odd shelf” of books about books on a recently installed bookshelf on the west wall of our family room.

The Pleasures of Reading

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The act of reading, the experience of it, can itself be rendered into an art form. And the art of reading is one of the great creative pleasures of life. The pleasures of reading go far beyond simply running one's eyes across the print of a page. The pleasures of reading go beyond the great worth of the accumulation of useful knowledge. We read newspapers to get the news. We read magazines to learn about new products of clothing or food or home décor, or to divert our attention while sitting in a barber shop or a doctor's office or in an airplane. We can read books in all of those places, of course (and maybe for all of those reasons) but we also read books for the sheer joy and pleasure of the act itself. We derive pleasure from reading regardless of the nature of the book: fiction, poetry, history, biography, autobiography, memoir, or inspiration. It doesn't matter.

We enjoy them all, depending on the mood we're in. We read library books against a deadline when they must be returned or "renewed," but even more wonderful are those books that we buy, or maybe one is given to us as an elegant gift. We buy them from Amazon.com or from Barnes & Noble online, or from another used book internet outlet. Even better, we go to a book shop for a particular volume we have heard about, or we happen upon it while scanning the delicious rows of bookcases, sometimes sitting on the floor in the aisle to peruse the lower shelves more readily. We buy these books because in ownership we can keep them and mark in them and read them again and again. We get the precious volume home and we inscribe our name inside the front cover or stamp a distinctive book plate there to mark the book as our own. Although some connoisseurs disdain the practice, I make a book my own by underlining key passages or by placing a handwritten star or an asterisk in the margin, a reminder that I might want to recall that thought again.

Sometimes, we purchase a venerably worn used volume and find on the pages within exciting "marginalia," the mysterious markings of a previous owner in another time and place. During an academic semester the stacks of books in my study and the stack of books on my bedside night stand have gotten taller. Bookmarked with only a thin slice having been read, these stacks of books represent at least the possibility of a time for unfettered, joyful, restful, peaceful examination, reading with no strings attached, no immediate deadlines to meet. Large blocks of time in the red easy chair in the study, legs extended on the matching red ottoman covered up with a luxuriously soft navy blue throw, a cup of steaming tea with honey near at hand on the library table.

Or by a crackling fire in the family room, in the recliner angled just so, making it possible to see the fireplace, but impossible to view the television screen, children lounging on the sofa or love seat watching said television screen, Evelyn in the other chair or sitting cross-legged on the floor reading herself. In such a room I find that I can still concentrate on the book of the moment, even between frequent glances at the scene before me and even with the incessant hum of the television. We live in a postmodern world after all.

This act of reading is an art, a creative act that we enjoy amid the hustle and bustle of all that goes on around us. We just open a book to immerse ourselves in another world, in another time and place, and in the process, in this creative act, we enrich and enliven the world we know as our own.

Reading and Eating

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My idea of a good time is to be seated in an isolated corner of a good-but not too good-restaurant, back to the wall so as to view the comings and goings before me, even from my private perch. From this vantage point, I can order an unsweetened iced tea, peruse a menu briefly for a simple meal, and then settle back for the real feast of the evening, a favored book, perhaps a memoir or a new work of fiction.

I would rather have a quiet meal with my family, a time to discuss the events of the day, or simply to delight in each other's company, but on the rare occasions when it is necessary for me to dine alone, I can find solace in the written word. I have gone, book in hand, to the Eagle and the Child pub-the Bird and the Baby where C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien read chapters from the Narnia tales or The Lord of the Rings aloud to each other in their Inklings meetings-to the Dinky Diner in Madisonville, Kentucky, and to a number of haunts here in Murray, my hometown.

It doesn't matter. Any place will do, as long as there is a modicum of good food and adequate light to see the page. It is a delight to drive to Mazzoni's Café in Louisville, the home of the "rolled oyster," or to Desha's or Joe Bolognia's in Lexington to participate in this time honored ritual: reading and eating. In Lexington, for example, it is best to go for a meal after a two hour splurge at Joseph-Beth bookstore. My favorite bookshop, I never fail to discover some new treasure at Joseph-Beth, and a visit there is a highlight of every trip from western Kentucky to Lexington. So, I take my stash, still in the Joseph-Beth shopping bag, to a Lexington restaurant, and after being seated, I lovingly take out each new volume.

I scan the blurbs on the book's dust jacket, I read the expressions of gratitude in the author's acknowledgements, and then I turn to the blank page at the very front of the book to inscribe the name of the book's new owner. I always write my full name, "James Duane Bolin," on the first line, followed by my home, "Murray, Kentucky," on the second line, and then the present date, the day that I purchased the book. This is my record of this important event. By this time, my dinner has arrived, so I carefully place the books aside, just long enough to enjoy the meal. Then I pick up a volume again, ask for another iced tea, and begin reading in earnest. Our son, Wesley, reads like this even in our company, but I can only do it when alone out in public.

For me, reading is at once solitary and communal; I read silently in delicious isolation, and then, only later, I dish out favorite passages aloud to my family and friends. Perhaps there is a more profound connection between reading and eating. A Teddy Roosevelt biographer wrote that TR "devoured" his books. And John Steinbeck wrote about his suggestion to his publishers, a suggestion "which they have stupidly failed to follow," he said. Steinbeck was convinced that weightier, thicker books sold better, and he suggested that "if the book were printed on rye bread it would be very much thicker." "Further," he wrote, "your bread book would solve two problems. The reader would never lose his place since he would eat each page as he finished it; also the lost profit of the borrowed book would be eliminated." "And people do like to read while they eat," Steinbeck concluded. Jesus agreed. "Man shall not live by bread alone," he quoted from Deuteronomy to Satan. Bread is important, but there is also the Word. I must agree with John Steinbeck and Jesus. After all, there is something very filling and fulfilling about reading and eating.

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