By Sarah Griswold
I never slept at naptime as a kid and did not appreciate bedtime much either. Since my mom always put my younger brother Peter to bed, my dad assumed the challenge of quieting me down. He met the task with patience and energy, Little House on the Prairie only rarely lulling him to sleep in mid-sentence.
There was one type of book that always kept us both awake: the atlas. A family friend had given me a large, beautifully illustrated children’s atlas. Rich with color and life, it covered swathes of the USA in dark green trees and filled the oceans on either side with silver fish. But the section I remember most was EUROPE. We pored over EUROPE, little multi-colored flags and tiny pictorial representations denoting each country. Goats, skiers, fishing boats, miniature Renaissance paintings–the tiny cultural symbols charmed and fascinated me. My dad encouraged me to memorize all the capitals, the rivers, the major mountain chains. And being a professor of history, he explained all this geography in its proper historical context. The Soviet Union stretched across a huge red sweep of land and had a tradition of invading or controlling the countries that edged its western border. Berlin was the capital of East Germany and Bonn the seat of West Germany; they had different governments and did not get along. The body of water dividing Great Britain from France, Belgium and Holland was called the English Channel; it had provided a natural barrier for Britain over the centuries.
In the years that followed, my dad began to quiz me on the geography and history of Europe–at bedtime, at dinnertime, in the car. He would sometimes throw in a few questions about Mark Twain and the American rivers, and once we decided to memorize the capitals of Africa. But inevitably I would want him to quiz me on Europe, where the questions and answers evoked visions of Romans building the Colosseum or of East Berliners trying to escape. Although I had not yet visited Europe, I developed a keen interest in its history, geography and culture through all these quizzes and conversations with my dad. In this way, he has been my mentor and the biggest influence on my decision to study history in college (and work at a history museum). It was not just information I gained through the quizzes and atlas sessions–it was an appreciation for how it all fit together, and a sense that it could be fun and exciting. My dad dropped almost everything if asked a historical question. He threw himself into the answer, providing a full description of the events preceding and following the moment in question. I felt special just for having asked the question. I still feel that way when we talk about history, which we often do. The new element in our discussions, which has enhanced everything for the better, is shared personal experience in the cities and countryside of Europe.
Over the past ten years, my dad and I have travelled together in Europe nearly every summer. We have attended the French Open together in Paris (and observed to our own pocketbook’s detriment that the French mob controls the ticket lines). On the western coast of Ireland we took a boat to an abandoned chain of isles and learned of its tradition of oral storytelling, now lost in the 21st-century. In 2003, one of the hottest European summers on record, we drove an un-airconditioned car around central Germany looking for an area known as the Waldecker Land only to discover that it looked exactly like our own Oklahoma landscape. The next summer we visited a place incomparable to anything, at least in our personal family history book: Utah Beach, where my paternal grandfather had come ashore as part of D-Day +3. Together with my mom, we walked along the beach in Normandy and picked up the stones and shells. And the following summer I met my dad in London on the day after the subway bombings. Still shaken up but required to host a public history event, I was so relieved and proud to have my dad there with me. Now when we talk about England or France, Germany or Ireland, the conversation often includes personal inflection–an attempt to understand the history by reflecting on what we’ve observed and witnessed on our travels.
My dad has become my favorite travel partner in Europe. He has helped me to find my academic and personal interest in Europe. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that I lost the atlas that started it all! I seem to have inherited this trait—absentmindedness—from my mentor as well.
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