During the summer, I will be posting segments of a memoir project I have begun that discusses teaching, learning, scholarship, reading...and the venerable, odd University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom, whose bestseller The Closing of the American Mind rocked American education almost twenty-five years ago. I have already written a little bit about Bloom on this blog, and had promised to start posting more pieces starting in June. Read the introduction to the series if you want the full context, but the individual posts are meant to be read on their own.
This is one post in a six-part series. Click below for the other posts:
Flowers Bloom—A Teaching Memoir
Growing Up History
Growing Up History
History found me early. During long summer evenings in North Dakota (my sister and I spent large amounts of our summers visiting our grandparents) I listened with grandpa and grandma to the Minnesota Twins on KFGO radio. Each game had its own rhythms, and I learned to think of time in strikes, balls, outs, and innings, rather than in minutes and seconds. The action went back and forth, and I quickly learned how different, say, a 2-0 count might appear to pitcher and batter—relativism, of a sort. Short of a blowout—grandma would always say that she wished we could save those runs for a day when we needed them more—we were never sure until, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, it was over. I could not articulate it back then, but the pain of the loss or the joy of the victory (each softened by more baseball almost every day) was nothing compared to what I felt the next morning, when the game was history.
Sitting at the card table that served as my breakfast nook those summer mornings, I drank my orange juice and studied the Fargo Forum. Although the front pages were hardly encouraging in the early 1970s, I could always count on the sports page to upset me—usually a short article with an abbreviated headline such as “Twins 4 White Sox 3.” This was followed by a paragraph that noted the “turning point,” of the game, implying that this or that moment—this or that hit, stolen base, or home run—decided the victory the night before. Today, certain writers might call that an “essentializing rhetoric.” I just thought it was shallow and deplorable.
It was not until several years later that I came to understand why my pancakes went down a little less easily all those years. The problem with those articles was that the writers knew the future. The night before, we didn’t. Grandma, grandpa, and I wondered about trends and movements, basepath decisions, and fielding errors. We guessed what they might mean in the bigger picture of the contest, and were usually wrong. The journalists who know what happened are never wrong. They get to say that Cesar Tovar had the game-winning hit in the fourth inning, and that the Twins “won” the game with three runs in the fourth. Funny thing, but the grandfolks and I had no idea it was the game-winning hit or that the Twins would win. The game wasn’t over. Five innings had yet to be played.
Those Fargo Forum writers who unknowingly decided my career knew that the Twins beat the White Sox by a run on that warm June evening in 1971, and their job was not to reproduce the lived experience of it. Their job was to summarize. The previous evening, the Twins and White Sox dealt with uncertainty, not knowing what would happen. For the writers, though, the teams’ future was their past, and they used that knowledge to write their accounts. I hated it, and for the first time felt there was something vaguely unethical about stripping the confusion and uncertainty from the story of what happened.
Sitting at the card table that served as my breakfast nook those summer mornings, I drank my orange juice and studied the Fargo Forum. Although the front pages were hardly encouraging in the early 1970s, I could always count on the sports page to upset me—usually a short article with an abbreviated headline such as “Twins 4 White Sox 3.” This was followed by a paragraph that noted the “turning point,” of the game, implying that this or that moment—this or that hit, stolen base, or home run—decided the victory the night before. Today, certain writers might call that an “essentializing rhetoric.” I just thought it was shallow and deplorable.
It was not until several years later that I came to understand why my pancakes went down a little less easily all those years. The problem with those articles was that the writers knew the future. The night before, we didn’t. Grandma, grandpa, and I wondered about trends and movements, basepath decisions, and fielding errors. We guessed what they might mean in the bigger picture of the contest, and were usually wrong. The journalists who know what happened are never wrong. They get to say that Cesar Tovar had the game-winning hit in the fourth inning, and that the Twins “won” the game with three runs in the fourth. Funny thing, but the grandfolks and I had no idea it was the game-winning hit or that the Twins would win. The game wasn’t over. Five innings had yet to be played.
Those Fargo Forum writers who unknowingly decided my career knew that the Twins beat the White Sox by a run on that warm June evening in 1971, and their job was not to reproduce the lived experience of it. Their job was to summarize. The previous evening, the Twins and White Sox dealt with uncertainty, not knowing what would happen. For the writers, though, the teams’ future was their past, and they used that knowledge to write their accounts. I hated it, and for the first time felt there was something vaguely unethical about stripping the confusion and uncertainty from the story of what happened.
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| [b] Living it RF |
And yet I was fascinated. Not long after this, I tried to put a version of my “ethical plan” into action, and strove to convey the excitement of lived experience whenever I talked about things that had already happened (I thought of this mostly in terms of “suspense,” not historiography in those days). I found it to be far more difficult than I had imagined. To begin, holding an audience was challenging. It was not long before friends and family members stopped asking life’s everyday questions (“how was the game?”) and waited for me to recover my senses.
My mother provided the key lesson. One early summer day, she received a phone call from a student who happened to be one of the best high school milers in the country. He was my hero, and my mom was his teacher. We went to almost all of his races back in Wisconsin, but we were in North Dakota for the summer. Listening from the other room, I heard a number, and I was stunned—4:09.8. That was faster than anyone in the country had run for some time, yet my mother’s expression (“I see, I see”) worried me. When she hung up the phone, I rushed to her and asked about the race. She told me that the pack hung closely together during a fast first lap, and that the top runners held back, letting others set the pace. As she started slowly to describe the beginning of the second lap, I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Just tell me what happened!” She smiled, and I knew that I was receiving my own treatment, even as the power of summary washed over me. “Please, just tell me what happened.”
Chastened, I sensed the complexity of life-as-lived. Still, I began to question how we really know anything at all, and that epistemological wariness persists. I have spent almost every day since then pondering statements about the past, the present, and the future. I remain suspicious of generalizations about events, especially those that telegraph the action, as it were. Journalists and historians are fortunate; they know who will win and who will lose, which trends will fizzle and which will gain traction. They already know what “we” did not in 1977—that our Chevy El Caminos with their shiny eight-track players “are” not the coolest thing since disco. Life is complicated, and I have never forgotten that writers of summaries (and teachers of introductory history classes) need to embrace that fact.
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| [c] Prediction RF |
This is one post in a six-part series. Click below for the other posts:
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Prairie Enculturation
Learning about culture, language, and note-taking can happen anywhere...even in the most exotic location the world has ever known.
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