Merry Goes to State

Friday night.  We've had tea but no dinner.  The TV blares and whines in the other room where the little girls are watching something. . .I know not what.  That is sad to admit but it is true.  Water simmers for macaroni and cheese and Charley lies despondently in his bed, as if he has just realized that happy hour is not occurring yet for dogs or people.  Martin just cried out from the Costco 20 minutes away.  I just called to find out what Merry, our twelve-going-on-twenty, is doing, since she disappeared to her friend, Molly's house, after school, and remained there.

She's had supper.  Burritos.  You are lucky, I told her.

Any minute she'll knock on the door and then we'll repair to the laundry room, where I keep our printer these days (a trick of the small house), and print out her last documents for History Day.

About a month ago, she and her friend Molly finished work on an enormous trifold about the Everett Massacre.  I knew nothing about Wobblies or the IWW or even about Everett, Washington, an industrial city close to Seattle.  But boy, do I now.  And, as history has a way of doing, now I care about all of it, too. It's the same story that happened so often in the early days of industrialism: workers suffered greatly at the hands of Masters, they tried to unionize, they were beaten and killed.  In this case, underpaid mill workers, many of whom had lost fingers and worse at work, were about to land peaceably in the Everett, "city of smokestacks,"  when deputies opened fire on the ship, and continued shooting at those who jumped overboard in a desperate attempt to escape.

Merry and Molly immersed themselves in history and thought intelligently and felt compassionately all the way through their research, and at Regionals, the judges must have noticed, because they came away with first prize.  Last weekend, we snuggled on the couch and watched the BBC North and South, Elizabeth Gaskgill's stunning work about industrialism in England.  Afterwards, Merry mused, "I thought it was an exaggeration to call what happened in Everett a massacre.  Only five deaths were recorded and I didn't think that counted as a massacre.  But now I realize that each of those people had a family and a real life."

This is where Martin and I hide in our tiny house to escape the chaos of a big project.  We drink wine down there on the floor and eat meals and chat.  Apparently, Charlie thought this was a good idea, too.

Tomorrow they're off to state.  They don't expect to win, but as Merry has conceded, that's not really the point of History Day.  The point is that you are changed by your research, that you think about the world differently.

A couple nights ago at bedtime, she turned a tear-streaked face to me and asked:  Why are people who just want to do the right thing punished for it?  Why does this still happen around the world?  Why are we so lucky that we get to live in a place where we are born with rights?

I remind myself: that's why it's so important to engage dynamically with history.  So that we are moved, so that we ask the questions that shape the world for the better, so that we learn from the real stories of others, people just like ourselves.

Since this photo, the girls have added a lot to their board.  Their bibliography,
which contains primary resources as well as secondary,  is near 10 pages long!