In the Attics of Our Lives
(or, the Library of Alexandria in a camp trunk)
By Stuart Grauer

Grateful Dead - Attics of My Life (View on YouTube)
In the attics of my life
Full of cloudy dreams; unreal
Full of tastes no tongue can know
And lights no eye can see
When there was no ear to hear
You sang to me

I am cleaning out my files this summer, so I will not saddle the next generation with 20 or 50 boxes and trunks full of artifacts.

It’s history. What will we pass along? There’s way too much of it. What gets buried or even burned?  I want to tell you about this and I promise a chill, beach read. Settle in. Inhale some history.  It’s summer. We will braid ideas and make a new whole. Read a story…

Attics
If you are cleaning out your own archives, try this maxim, put civilly: “Nobody wants your freaking stuff.” I tried to stick to that. But it’s more than stuff. It is the well and wash of times gone by. It’s life, deep and warm and sinking. Your life. Your history.

Thousands of documents. Why did I ever save them? It’s some kind of respect thing, I assume, and so I make a promise to myself, out of respect: I will read each document before tossing. Well, won’t I? There are boxes and boxes of papers and photos and old stuff.

And I want my attic back, though my past life seems to live there. Nobody wants your … stuff.

Now I have hauled all the boxes and past lives down to the living room and they are everywhere.

First box. Quickly, I come upon a yellowed, tattered list of questions to ask a French chef who was a guest in my class one time. My first fulltime, tenured public school job was as a history teacher in a large school on Long Island. I remember it now. That course was called European Culture Studies. I was innocently trying to be a good teacher by opening up my classroom to European culture.

I remember all that now. And I toss the question list out. My descendants will never know about the French chef. He is gone from history.

In earlier days, that course had been called Western Civilization, “Western Civ.” In the 1970s, the department of education temporarily determined that what U.S. kids really needed to know was our “real” heritage, our European heritage, a view that the current U.S. executive branch espouses. (After all, we won the big wars and created the Ivy League.)

In European Culture, such as we told all schoolkids was their heritage, we headed straight for the Greeks, the Romans’ rise and fall, and European Medieval times. The Age of Explorers, the Age of Kings, and so on past the Industrial Revolution. To the Great Wars.

Testing
As a history teacher, we knew that our students’ knowledge of all this European Culture would be tested, too.  At the end of the year. There was a somewhat feared, standardized statewide test called the New York State Regents Exams. Issue:

I was not exactly following the Regents syllabus verbatim.

The syllabus did not include any chefs. I knew that!

And I was really trying to be a good teacher. But I was in my 20s! 

For the Middle Ages, I brought in a Franciscan Friar in his brown robes, to talk about monastic life. Before leaving, he lifted the bottom of his frock and lo and behold he was wearing blue jeans. Not in the syllabus. Not in history.

For our studies in France, that French chef from Manhattan, who I had seen written up in the New York Times, who had had me smell his divine truffles, came out and showed the students how to make French candies—and to answer the questions I had written down and saved on a sheet of yellow, lined paper.

European Culture, right? For the Age of Explorers, I took them to the South Street Seaport to see the tall ships. You see where I was heading? I thought history was living.

I was not exactly heading for the Regents syllabus rigorously:

From Europe, we learned, Columbus “discovered” a New World. There were millions of Indigenous people he called Indians, which he ran into on account of sailing in the wrong direction. He discovered them and, from then on, they existed.

Columbus: courageous and statuesque.

My students and I studied the Indians. (Not in the syllabus!)

Magellan, of astonishing fortitude, was first to circumnavigate the world—an astonishing explorer! Except he was killed by the Indonesians he tried to subjugate before he was even halfway around the same world he is credited with being the first to sail all the way around. How did he get credit for this? Simple: his ship’s reporter was a really good writer.

History is what gets passed down. Whatever it is.

Note: I am all for the Age of Discovery! I personally trademarked the paradigm: “Learn by Discovery,” THE GRAUER SCHOOL, Trademark serial number 78216548. I own Learn by Discovery. It’s historical. Don’t try using it. We got lawyers.

The job of a history teacher is to pass along culture and truth. It’s a given that history teachers know what that is. Because it’s right there for them in the textbook.

I am afraid I veered much wider than the “truth” in my European Culture Studies lessons. I brought in officials from the United Nations who started us down a long road studying world hunger and food production, overpopulation, and various global affairs. We (and the whole of European Culture) were the First World, and we were started by Columbus.

Trouble is:  all that U.N. stuff was called the Third World—not “our” culture, any more than the Second World, which was Russia. Not us, not relatable. (Digression: they had killed my forefathers.)

(Coming back from digression:)
I was taking my students out of bounds for the Regents exams.

 I did not think much of any of this until I got a pink slip at the end of the year—I got laid off. My students, it turned out, had performed poorly on the N.Y. State Regents exams. I had not passed along the right history.

Luckily, I was saved again by my writing skills. I documented all of the above, and more, in a letter to the principal and the vice-principal. I was rewriting history. We met. The principal relented. I kept my job. (That summer, I taught him how to fish on Lake Winnipesaukee.)

All of the above only egged me on.

I taught all about the South Seas and even created a kava kava ceremony for my students as we learned how Magellan never made it around the world, despite his iconic, legendary circumnavigation. Was I trying to get fired!

We studied the Industrial Revolution – including its pollution and child labor--and visited the construction site of a local nuclear power plant—what would they do with the 10,000 years of waste? No one knew. So much for the industrial revolution. The legendary Bell Labs had invented the solar cell 20 years before that, but not a soul in high school studied that.

Don Kish got 7 patents while at Bell Labs in the 1960s. In the 1990s and oughts, Don was our legendary physics and math teacher

Had it occurred to me that I was subverting the prevailing notion of history in showing my students any of the above, I’m sure I would have been fired. Deservedly? Who knows.

But I was innocent and only following my own process of discovery. 

When I was a kid, history was a kind of gospel, some of it had even been written on stone tablets. In this gospel, people like Indians—from India and from the New World, both—were footnotes to all the Europeans had done. The European conquerors, artists, writers, generals made history, no one else. Everyone else were peasants or nowhere near as civilized, despite a few anomalies like Confucius and the Communists.

Time marches. History gets written. Over the coming decades, the world, prevailing educational theories, and the teaching profession all changed. European Culture Studies teachers were to teach World Cultures, whatever that meant, then Global Studies, then World History and Geography, and so on. Today, the U.S. President and supporters want schools to begin with the Ten Commandments, whatever course they may be studying, and they claim moral authority over history by virtue of having won the last election.

So, today, our US culture is again being seen as “Western.” Interestingly, the old title—European Culture Studies—sounds more humanistic and interdisciplinary than many modern courses, too. It suggests literature, art, philosophy, music, religion, and ideas, not just chronology. And not just victory or dominance. We build history out of what we like, like a playroom.

Archives
Now I am preparing to throw hundreds of my own travel journals in the recycle bin: faded photographs, love letters, many long letters from caring people whom I had stopped thinking much about; job rejection letters; a massive paper correspondence that taught me how to be a writer. The emails I send today would not teach anyone how to be a writer. They are short and they lack soul. They braid nothing. They are informational, not epistolary. They have no life, and people act like they have no time for more.

I get a sense of overwhelm. Our histories deserve review and reverie as they fill up our attics and our souls. And I get a sense of “real” history being the study of living cultures, cultures in a hurry if not exhausted.

Cast Aways
There are boxes and boxes. I am startled by how much I had forgotten, and how much had once mattered. Entire friendships, ambitions, romances, arguments, dreams—all reduced to a few fading pages in a few boxes.

And now, I have re-read every single letter, and feel some deepening and appreciation, and very much loss. We take our times for granted way more than we can realize while those times are happening. History is the slim pick’ins of every one of us. But mainly of the powerful and wealthy.

So, suddenly, at last, I feel an enormous sense of loss to those people and times I may toss in the recycle bin. We embody those people and times we have left behind, or loved, or taken for granted, and tossing out all of their artifacts may not be historical justice.

Standing over a bin, holding a stack of forty-year-old letters, which you will do one day unless you want your kids to do it, you may find yourself facing the same question that confronts every historian:

What deserves to survive?  This story?

No archive can keep all our attics. No curriculum can teach all the history. Every act of remembering is met with a great many more acts of forgetting. Of letting go.

Here is a photo of me looking weird, and there a letter written to me I also shall not be passing along to my daughter. I toss bundles and pounds of letters into the recycling bin, because I am writing history. I am making curricular decisions. I am deciding what future generations need to know about my life. Historians do this. So do teachers. So do states. So do dads.

The attics of our lives contain whole lives that may have more meaning as we churn through them than they ever did in real-time. There’s joy and success in there.

And there is so much pain in a life and a culture. Historiographers must feel like infant trauma doctors as they separate out what we can save or lose. Sometimes I can hardly bear some of my past, just as sometimes I can’t bear looking at the news today: the greed, the wars, the egos in charge, and I wonder how all this will be written up and passed along versus gone like the howl of a coyote behind my house right now or like a life I could have lived but didn’t and so it feels like a lost life.

A time to keep, and a time to cast away. — Ecclesiastes 3:6

 By the way, those European Culture Studies courses we used to teach were not all bad: they resembled the old "Great Books" and "Western Heritage" programs that were common in universities during the 1960s and 1970s. But they naturally buried a great many ugly photos so they could save their favorites, just like you do in your life’s attics: They put Plato and Michelangelo and Shakespear and Napolean in the trunk for the next generation, while discarding ordinary villagers, most Indigenous peoples, most women, laborers, and colonized cultures.

Lets Wrap This Up and Get on With Summer
That tension between the victors and the less wealthy has been at the center of history education debates for the last fifty years—or maybe forever. Somehow, if we are going to teach the history as we have lived it, we will have to deal with the Euro-centric teaching.

The colonialism, the eastern and southern hemisphere greatness we marginalized, as they might us.

When some students and I visited schools in Cuba, their books were filled with photos of great men who our books at home villainized. Little children sang songs about these villains. We joined them, my own Grauer School students, sung with the Communists. Take that!

So, let’s bring this home.

Today, California's current World History course is largely about understanding how societies and cultures interact. How they shape the world we think we are in. But the State stopped annual history testing in 2013. For all they know, teachers are teaching European Culture Studies. Or indigenous studies. Or Second World communism, which, as we know it was actually more like fascism. Which we hate. We are anti-fascist.

In conclusion, the boxes in my attic taught me something that never got on the Regents exams: History is not the study of the past. It is the study of what survives us.

Every culture and every individual converting an attic into a playroom for their grandchildren decides what to carry forward and what to leave behind.

Now I find my Highest Camp Honors trophies from Camp Awosting. Me. Camper of the year. Did my life peak around the age of 13?

So I look up that camp for the first time in a half decade, and I email the founder’s son, Buzzy. I thank him for how formative that all was, how deepening—and I even tell him how I used some camp principles in developing a school. This is true.

And then, all there is left to do is heap those trophies in the bin, like little pieces of my soul that will be done for, like a funeral prelude. They are my Mayan Codices, my Library of Alexandria: Look those up. Peak human history. Vanished. They are the entire oral history of prehistoric people. The duck-billed platypus. They are every aging man or woman cleaning out a garage or attic.

Most all of those men and women have been completely forgotten in less than 50 years after they are gone, as though they never set foot on the face of the earth, and not much of this is met with any sense of loss. Their “real” history already passed into other lives, the lives of descendants and students, which is what great parents and teachers do. After all:

"For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
— Gospel of Matthew 6:21

Whatever was worth saving has escaped the archive and taken up residence in the hearts and habits of those who come next.

The next generation is our treasure, especially teachers and parents and beneficiaries. Muse about this as you are sitting on the beach this summer or travelling to see the sites you will make photos of. After seeing probably like two or three photos in my original camp trunk, my daughter will get the idea that it is filled to the brim with unformed or unfinished dreams, and maybe a few dreams realized, people loved and almost forgotten until now; that the trunk is my Library of Alexandria, and she will figure out what to do with it by the time she makes her own trunk.

So later on, or sometime in the world, you might think you are cleaning the attic, but you will be teaching history, shaping stories out of silence and carrying them forward, releasing them like leaves coming off the trees in the fall when the wind comes.

What will your children and descendants get? What will your students get? I have read every letter now, and tomorrow is trash pickup day. I take the giant boxes of paper and trophies out and they slide into the bin and it sounds scratchy and hollow, like another world.

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