When she started to flag, I interrupted. “Harriet, what does ‘Oklahoma Rooster’ mean to you?”
“I don’t have much history for that one. Came from an Oklahoma fiddler named Dick Hutchinson, but I don’t know if he wrote—”
“—I don’t mean the history. What does it make you feel?”
“I’m not sure what you mean. It’s a nice, simple fiddle tune.”
“But you’ve actually seen a farm in real life. Does it sound like a rooster?”
She shrugged. “I’ve never really given it much thought. It’s a nice tune. Not worthy of a spot in the Memory Project, but a nice tune. Why do you ask?”
It would sound stupid to say I thought myself on a farm when I played that song; I wouldn’t tell her where “Wind Will Rove” took me either. “Just curious.”
“Harriet’s grandson is going to drive me crazy,” I told Natalie. I had spent the afternoon with Teyla and Jonah, as I did every Friday, but this time Jonah had dragged us to the low gravity room. They had bounced, and I had watched and laughed along with their unrestrained joy, but I had a shooting pain in my neck from the way my head had followed the arcs of their flight.
Afterward, I’d logged into my class chat to find Nelson had again stirred the others into rebellion. The whole class, except for two I’d describe as timid and one as diligent, had elected not to do the new assignment due Tuesday. They had all followed his lead with a statement “We reject history. The future is in our hands.”
“At least they all turned it in early,” Nat joked. “But seriously, why are you letting him bother you?”
She stooped to pick up some of the toys scattered across the floor. The kids drew on the table screen with their fingers. Jonah was making a Tyrannosaurus, all body and tail and teeth and feathers. Teyla was still too young for her art to look representational, but she always used space in interesting ways. I leaned in to watch both of them.
“You laugh,” I said. “Maybe by the time they’re his age now, Nelson will have taken over the entire system. Only the most future-relevant courses. Reject the past. Don’t reflect on the human condition. No history, no literature, no dinosaurs.”
Jonah frowned. “No dinosaurs?”
“Grandma Rosie’s joking, Jonah.”
Jonah accepted that. His curly head bent down over the table again.
I continued. “It was one thing when he was a one-boy revolution. What am I supposed to do now that his virus is spreading to his whole class?”
Nat considered for a moment. “I’d work on developing an antidote, then hide it in a faster, stronger virus and inject it into the class. But, um, that’s my professional opinion.”
“What’s the antidote in your analogy? Or the faster, stronger virus?”
Nat smiled, spread her hands. “It wasn’t an analogy, sorry. I only know from viruses and toddlers. Sometimes both at once. Now are you going to play for these kids before I try to get them to sleep? They really like the one about the sleepy bumblebee.”
She picked Teyla up from her chair, turned it around, and sat down with Teyla in her lap. Jonah kept drawing.
I picked up my fiddle. “What’s a bumblebee, Jonah?” He answered without looking up. “A dinosaur.”
I sighed and started to play.
Natalie’s answer got me thinking. I checked in with Nelson’s literature teacher, who confirmed he was doing the same thing in her class as well.
How wrong was he? They learned countries and borders, abstract names, lines drawn and redrawn. The books taught in lit classes captured the human condition, but rendered it through situations utterly foreign to us. To us. To me as much as him.
I had always liked the challenge. Reading about the way things had been in the past made our middle-years condition more acceptable to me. Made beginnings more concrete. Everyone in history lived in middle-years too; no matter when they lived, there was a before and an after, even if a given group or individual might not be around for the latter. I enjoyed tracing back through the changes, seeing what crumbled and what remained.
I enjoyed. Did I pass on my enjoyment? Maybe I’d been thinking too much about why I liked to study history, and not considering why my students found it tedious. It was my job to find a way to make it relevant to them. If they weren’t excited, I had failed them.
When I got home from dinner that night, when I picked up my fiddle to play “Wind Will Rove,” it was the new, elided version, the one that had escaped me previously. Now I couldn’t find the original phrasing again, even with fifty years’ muscle memory behind it.
I went to the database to listen to how it actually went, and was relieved when the song came up without trouble. The last variation in the new DB was filed under “Wind Will Rove” but would more accurately have been listed as “Wind Will Roam,” and even that one recreated somebody’s memory of an interview predating our ship. If this particular song’s history hadn’t contained all those interviews in which the song’s interpreters sang snippets, if Harriet or my grandmother or someone hadn’t watched it enough times to memorize it, or hadn’t thought it important, we wouldn’t have any clue how it went. Those little historic recreations weren’t even the songs themselves, but they got their own piece of history, their own stories. Why did they matter? They mattered because somebody had cared about them enough to create them.
I walked into my classroom on Monday, fiddle case over my shoulder, to the nervous giggles of students who knew they had done something brazen and now waited to find out what came of it. Nelson, not giggling, met my gaze with his own, steady and defiant.
“Last week, somebody asked me a question, using the very odd delivery mechanism of my classroom walls.” I touched my desk and swiped the graffitied walls blank.
“Today I’m going to tell
