The Secret Price of History. Gayle Ridinger
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can't quite believe that others may covet some small thing we own. We might realize they are envious of our lifestyle, our spouse, bank account, good looks, career, well-brought-up kids, pleasant personality, resourcefulness, solid faith in something bigger...but envious to the point of obsession with some little object we possess? With such determination to have it that they might try to kill us?
Well, jewelry is small, you object. You are thinking of gold or diamonds. Let's forget diamonds: many of us have never had so much as a diamond engagement ring or we've divorced and sold it. And gold? But how many old wedding bands or christening bracelets are sitting undisturbed at the bottom of countless jewelry boxes without a shot being fired?
No, there is something strange going on. Something twenty-one-year-old Angie Cebrelli isn't aware of as she crosses the sunny field to the grandstand filled with people waiting to watch the Gettysburg Civil War battle re-enactment. When she asks one of the men wearing a baseball cap if the place next to him is taken, he moves his big butt a few more inches towards his child. She sees his eyes go to her breasts under her tank top—the same thing happened with some jerk at lunch. When the man obligingly swings his little boy up on his lap to make still more room for her, Angie feels a small foot kick her knee-cap. A pudgy hand reaches towards her neck piece. "No, honey," she mouths at the toddler with a smile.
She's in an excellent mood. It all started two months ago, when suddenly a way presented itself, like a tunnel into a magic mountain, which allowed her to stop flitting around at college, changing majors and being a financial strain on her mother. Her mother's friend Stan offered her a bit of temp work at his rural Virginian TV station—one of those down-home-folksy channels that auctions off dish sets, watches, and rugs day and night, and instead of thinking it would be embarrassing to work there, as she might have once, she had instead the miraculous understanding that she should say yes. She wasn't going to ever have a Ivy League-style career—no memory of encouraging words from her mother—or from her father before the accident eight years ago—was going to change that, for she simply lacked the drive or focus for it, and to make it all worse there was an economic crisis on. No, she had nothing ahead of her but a dark mass called the Future, and whatever tunnel opened into it was the one to take. Who was she to say, 'No, that's stupid, that's sexist, being the Channel 19 weather girl is not what I want out of life'? Who was she to demand more?
For the first week (while the regular weather girl recovered from her bladder operation), Angie stuck to her sunshine-and-rain script. A weather girl is a weather girl. On the following Monday, however, the idea came to her out of nowhere that she could read the weather as a famous person from the past whose birthday it was that day. She showed up for the 6 pm broadcast dressed up like Joanne of Arc. Stan got a kick out of that, and so on Wednesday she came as Fred Astaire. While Stan seemed happy enough again, she wasn't completely pleased. It felt like playing at dress-up. Could she connect with her viewers more? Could she find a BIG IDEA (or whatever that term was that she'd studied in her sociology-of-mass-media course) that would make Stan want to keep her on at the station even when the regular girl returned?
Last Friday, with her mother's help, the BIG IDEA came to her.
Showers tomorrow, folks. A far cry from the hot sunny weather on this day back in 1863. Does that date, July 3rd, tell you anything about who am I tonight? Does this red jacket from an old family suitcase give you any clue? If you guessed I'm a Civil War soldier, even though I'm dressed in red, you're right. I'm my great-great-great-grandfather, a member of the Italian regiment called the Garibaldi Guards, who fought at Gettysburg. And I got to wondering—how many of you folks at home also had ancestors who fought in the Civil War, or even a more recent conflict, and wonder what it was like? Write to our website and tell us a battle they were in, and I'll help you out in that regard. I'll send back word on the weather that day.
Someone uploaded that weather report on You-Tube. Over the weekend people started to watch it. Hundreds at first, and then a couple of thousand. Every so often, her mom and she checked their numbers on the computer.
On Monday morning, Stan told her that the Washington Post would be printing the blog photo of her dressed as Nonno Goffredo; it was so exciting to be in the Washington Post that she screamed over the phone. Also, it seemed that two hundred people had already written to Channel 19 with details of their relatives, not only from the Civil War and the two World Wars, but also from Vietnam and Iraq.
Thank you all. As I said on the air, I'll get back to you soon. In the meantime, consider how much you can come to understand of your ancestor's life if you go to a battle re-enactment. And of course I hope you'll follow me on this blog as I attend the important one going on in Gettysburg.
The trip to the Gettysburg re-enactment was Stan's idea. Of course Angie said yes; it was another yard or so of tunnel dug into her mountain. She had never felt her life humming along like this. Everything had always seems either tentative or a struggle, and when her father died it had felt worse than even either of those. Maybe bad things had to happen before good things can?
"I want new photos for the blog," Stan told her. "I know it's going to be 100 degrees in the shade in Gettysburg—don't worry about the red shirt, but what else can you put on? What else does Delia have?"
Her mother set out on the kitchen table Nonno Goffredo's reading glasses and a bullet-fused-into-a-penny. "I got spanked for playing with these as a child," she revealed. "Well, what do you say? Want to wear his glasses with his soldier's cap?"
Angie didn't like the idea of appearing on TV with glasses. "Isn't there anything else?"
"Well, there're these tweezers with a tiny Italian flag stuck on it."
"And?"
Her mother scrounged further. "And a vial of dried dark stuff."
They made faces at each other. "Do you think that's blood in there, Mom?"
"Could be." A librarian and history buff, her mother gave a sort of speculative chuckle at such things.
Then she set the gold medallion on top of the pile. It was the size of a small peach or a large-ish swimming metal, and it had a lion-man creature and a radiating sun symbol engraved on it.
"Hey," Angie said, taking it in.
"Stan is going to like this."
She was right.
It was a three-and-a-half hour drive to Gettysburg and Angie arrived at lunch time. Her college-wetted sense of aesthetics guided her into the parking lot of the Gettysburg Inn, a nicely restored early 19th century mansion, just off the main square, with a lawn sign advertising sandwiches and salads at special prices. Eager to get to the re-enactment site, she ordered just a tuna salad, which came quickly. Paying her bill took forever, however, on account of the strangely unhappy conversation—cryptic and full of long pauses—that the plump lady at the cash desk was having with a man in a blue Union officer's uniform. The fellow was creepy looking, with that black goatee covering his chin like moss, and he kept making sideway glances at Angie's chest. She was glad to be out of there.
At the grandstand it is as roiling hot as on the 'battlefield.' Anyone over the age of seven is training binoculars or cameras at the two Union and Confederate 'armies' on the field. Angie raises her camera and takes the selfie that Stan wants. She thinks about how her mom back in Virginia would have liked to come but couldn't get the day off. At this moment her mother is sitting at the library circulation desk in the cool silence of other people's reading time. At the thought of this coolness, Angie raises the hot medallion from her sticky chest and tries fanning herself with it as she reads the Park Service brochure over the shoulder of the woman in front of her. 'Pickett's Charge. The infantry attack across open fields—12,000 against 6,000—ordered by Confederate General Robert E. Lee against General George G. Meade's Union positions on Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863, the last day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Fifty percent of the Southerners were to die in all futility.'
The show of futility is very well staged. It starts with the re-enacting Confederate artillery corps belching and thundering for ten minutes in the middle of the field, then lines of figures with rifles raise them at each other, and there are cracking sounds as some of the figures rush forward into the