Welcome to My Geekdom in Packrat

I'm a geek, specifically a history geek. In my younger years history had never been a consuming passion, even that of my own people, and when we visited historic sites (Gettysburg, Washington, D.C., the Statue of Liberty) I usually never looked up from the book I was reading unless made to. I never saw the scenery as we drove through it, barely registered whatever made the ground I walked on "historic", although at the time I kept travel diaries. I typed with one finger on a manual typewriter (I still have it in a shed; I can't part with it) and then stapled the pages together. I may have paid little attention to my surroundings in favor of books, but something sank in; when "Gettysburg" came out, I remembered the terrain and got goosebumps, and something of the places I'd been lodged inside me. I used to get a souvenir from every place I'd been and then when friends came by I'd tell them about the origin of each piece.

"Gettysburg" is based on a novel by Michael Shaara called The Killer Angels, a well researched book of much historic fact tied together as a story with a fiction that is really an educated guess. Who said what, who thought that. When I read it I have to keep at it to the end.

I recently read Dolley: A Novel of Dolley Madison in Love and War by Rita Mae Brown. She always had an interest in Dolley, and she researched her life and wrote the novel based on the idea that Dolley kept a diary. At first the facts seem a bit much (sometimes the facts can get in the way of a good story! lol) and I wondered if people in real life would spend so much time on politics and the accompanying games; she was very much a force behind the scenes - and, duh, in some circles, yes, they would. Once she sets the scene overall, the book then becomes Dolley's story, and personalities emerge so vividly.

I liked it so much that I started to read it again, very much wanting another book of the same kind - which I found last Friday. Another author, Syrie James, wrote two such books - well researched and based on two historical figures and told in "their" words: The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen and The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte. I read the Austen book in one sitting on Saturday and am halfway through the Bronte book. I could easily read it in one sitting, too, but things like, oh, work, eating, and showering get in the way.

These authors make these women of long ago seem not only alive but friends. I wanted to be a writer. I have troves of my writing - poems, essays, short stories. Books I put together as a child. One of the interesting facts about both Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte is that they are "characters" who want to write, and you know that, in reality, they did.

I recently wrote that I finished Wau-bun by Juliette Kinzie, the wife of an Indian agent, and how she was terrified of us but also presented a balanced view. I'm going to Wisconsin next week, and the Wordsmith is going to take me to the "Old Indian Agency House" that had been built for Kinzie and her husband! Geek heaven!

I received a call today from a reporter writing about the Black Hawk conflict; we eagerly shared information about sources, and I saw that the book, The Sauk and the Black Hawk War (which it wasn't, and even the book says as much) by Perry Armstrong uses the Kinzie book as a reference. I had just told the reporter about that book. Anyway, we found ourselves to be kindred spirits as we both love to talk about history and find, as she said, that the people we talk to "get that trapped look".

But I always want to know why. Even the best ghost stories have to tell history, because the ghosts have to come from somewhere. I still write stories for our newspaper because I want to know why something happened, whose brainchild it is, how they decided what they did, and how someone in the center of it all felt about it. I also think of those to come: they'll want to know how we decided what we did. Or at least a future geek will.

Once upon a time I would never have wanted to be known as a geek, but now I proclaim it proudly as I push my glasses back up (okay, stereotypical, but I really have to do that). I saw history books as one big storybook but with places you could actually visit. Now even my own family gets exasperated when I have to tell a story to answer their simplest questions. Hey, I'm a Virgo; I thrive on details.

If this entry has a point, I guess it's to say, "It's all Geek to me!"