Hey, How About a Little Historic Designation Over Here?
A topic that hasn’t received sufficient exploration is whether or not you can designate yourself as an historic site.
Not your home, your area, your block, your school, or your place of business, but you yourself.
The concept is simple: if these other fine categories are deserving of preservation and a bit of celebration, why not the suitably seasoned human being who still stands firm on his foundations?
That seems worthy of a plaque or two and some deference from the rest of society for his survival skills.
I have heard too that there are tax advantages associated with a successful application, and the prudent taxpayer is always on the lookout for those.
The current application process – I have looked it up – is mired in conventional thinking and limits itself to buildings, sites, districts, structures, and objects. Yesterday’s thinking in other words.
This is a very limited point of view. In fact, it may be that the fine people at The National Park Service who run the program may welcome a fresh approach.
Upon first receiving the initial submittal form for an actual person, they may stand around looking at it in wonder: “lookee here, now why didn’t we think of that?”
I don’t hold it against them. It really is hard to free yourself of the shackles of orthodox thinking, which is why a lot of the best ideas spring from the collective mind of a well-informed citizenry.
They must however beware of opening the floodgates to any well, nut, who gets the idea of designating themselves as an historic entity. There have to be standards.
As a start, I propose that eligibility be limited to those applicants who can, upon rigorous testing, prove that they:
Will almost always, not simply on occasion, refer to a refrigerator as an icebox.
Still carry in their sense memory the burnt plastic smell of popping ‘flash cubes’ as used in certain cameras in certain eras, and can all but feel their hot touch on the palm of the hand when ejected.
Have no problem picturing a small sail-shaped ‘wing’ window on the driver’s side of a passenger car that you wound open with a crank, out of which you let the smoke and the ashes of your cigarette trail.
Remember a time when the radio on that same car had buttons which, when punched, took you rapidly from one station to the other.
Clearly remember that for certain men of a certain age the correct attire for mowing the lawn, however beastly the heat, was a pair of heavy striped bib overalls, as railway men wore, and a cap of the same variety. Boots, what you might call old Army boots, could complete the look. Oh, also, it was entirely up to the fashion sense of the man himself whether he wore or did not wear a sleeveless ribbed t-shirt under the overalls.
Remember a time when many good men and not a few women wore shirts that included their names stitched into the fabric. This practice deserved to be more widespread and could do a world of good at large business conferences and trade shows but in fact has faded out almost entirely out of fashion.
Remember that many men jangled audibly with each step, when they walked, either by way of (1) the full set of keys arranged on a hoop affixed to their belt, enough keys to open half the buildings in the city it seemed; (2) a metallic coin-emitting device that sorted quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies into tubes, each with a latch at the bottom to spit out whatever change was necessary after a transaction; or (3) various configurations of deep-pocketed tool-carrying leather belts worn everywhere — school, church, grocery store — most valued it seemed when far far from the job site.
Carried with them at all times a fistful of dimes and quarters in case they needed to make a phone call.
Oh, which by the way you would make — this phone call that I speak of — from a coin-operated public phone affixed either on the inside or outside wall of an establishment, or within a free-standing booth on the sidewalk, whose folding glass doors could be closed for privacy.
Remembered that at the time they recalled phone numbers by an alphanumeric system; for instance you would not remember 299 as a prefix, couldn’t even imagine why you’d want to, but would instead carry CY9 around in your head as you prepared to dial and waited for the other four numbers to pop into your head, as they always would. I have never come across a surer system for remembering phone numbers and wonder why it has faded away.
For a good portion of their life knew only shaving razors of the ‘naked blade’ variety, whereby you would open the head of the device, discard the bare blade contained therein, now dull, and replace it with a new bare blade. Both were maliciously sharp, by far the sharpest thing in the house or any house.
For a like good portion of their school years never saw a ballpoint pen, if they had even been invented then, but instead placed a plastic cartridge of blue or black ink into the hollow body of a fountain pen, which when closed and twisted shut thereby pierced the cartridge, making it ready either for use in actual writing or for spilling out all over the page.
Remember, once arriving at the legal driving age, simply driving around all day with no destination, with a companion or sometimes without, doing nothing but listening to the radio and looking at things as they went by.
A good half of the photographic record of your life was carried on in black and white, giving you the feeling in looking back through them that most of the things around you when young – trees, lawns, houses, buildings, streetlights, catfish held up proudly hanging from a metallic ‘stringer’ – were actually black and white, and color itself is a relatively recent invention.
A certain other segment of the photographic evidence of your life is contained in what were known as Polaroid prints, which spit out from the side of the camera within a minute or two of taking the picture proper. They weren’t bad quality-wise, though when color finally did enter the world, the Polaroids were rather too vivid in that department.
You had to find your way, or alternately get lost completely, entirely on your own with a map or pest-like insistent asking for directions from strangers. You couldn’t blame a thing on GPS. Many people spent hours of each day completely lost.
If you wished to contact someone you would call them or write them or find a way to come across them in person. How else could you?
Eating out was a big deal and by and large, even at a sit down restaurant, was inferior to what you can get today from the offhand offerings on the grill at the local gas station. A slice of roast beef at one of the former, one of the medium fancy places, might well include a sheen of subtly colored fat around the rim, shimmering iridescently. And that was about as good as it got.
On the other hand products, by contrast, that came from fast food or drive-in restaurants were commonly referred to as ‘gut bombs,’ and with good reason.
There were no lady barbers, tofu, quinoa, yogurt, couscous, more than one flavor of coffee, bottled water (this one in particular would be particularly mystifying at the time, who needs bottled water?), more than one type of lettuce, salad bars, natural ingredients, delis, or fresh fish unless you lived on one of the coasts.
Most ethnic food, Mexican, Indian, Chinese, German, either canned or served up fresh at stands or storefront restaurants, were just as bad as American food, often worse.
Barbecue in particular was a foul offering, with only a perfunctory attention to anything like authenticity. Most of it was cheap American meat slathered with greasy sauces from who knows where, most likely the Ozarks which never had a real barbecue tradition.
On the other hand, the word ‘authentic’ had no particular cultural weight and in fact may not have been invented yet. Everything was authentic simply by being in the world.
People happily lit up cigarettes in college classrooms, business offices, restaurants, grocery stores, and for all I know, the operating rooms of hospitals.
Athletic shoes hadn’t yet been invented or branded, all that anyone anywhere ever wore were what might better be called thin rubber-soled deck shoes, providing virtually no protection to bones, ligaments, or the soles of your feet.
If you were shown a pair of flip flops your most likely question would be ‘why would anyone wear anything like that?”
The very summit of yard decoration was a silver ball, perhaps double the size of a bowling ball, with a reflective surface, perched on a stone pillar of sorts. It was never pointed out to me that this served any purpose other than a kind of homespun prettiness, which was perfectly good enough.
If you had a tattoo you were either a sailor, a convict, a biker, or a criminal in training. Perhaps a professional wrestler, I forgot those guys.
Anyone wearing jeans torn at the knees or thighs you would feel sorry for and make a point of keeping them in your prayers.
The favored position on a long car trip for a child from a large family was the back ledge of the interior of the car, wedged against the slant of the rear window, where you could sleep comfortably.
There were no non-stick surfaces. To the contrary, nearly everything, upon cooking, stuck near-permanently to the surface it was cooked upon and had to be peeled, or sometimes pried or sometimes scraped off.
Cars broke down all the time, all the time, disastrously so, and people started thinking of trading them in at the 20,000 mile mark. With good reason.
Indoor carpets were rare, ceilings were the same ten-foot height from room to room, wood paneling was a handy way to refresh a room, and each living space was small and somewhat closed in.
Well, and so on.
The careful reader will supply addenda of his or her own to this list. In fact it is the type of list that seems to invite exactly that, as one memory leads to another, as beads strung along a string in a beaded curtain array and as the rain sometimes comes down early in a shower, big separate drops chasing each other down.
The point of the exercise is to make clear that anyone who does not remember these things, and has not lived them – and it is a shrinking cohort, which makes it all the more important that we preserve such ancient artifacts of an earlier era such as myself while we still can – cannot possibly be counted among the historically significant.
Say this scheme works. Say it clears the panel there at the Department of Interior and I get a certificate in the mail saying, congratulations, you are now an official historic site.
What would be the appropriate attitude of young people in my presence?
Hushed awe?
Perhaps. Perhaps. Though I wouldn’t insist upon it, that’s just not my way.
At the least you would want them to have an awareness that they are experiencing history itself, as it is said people react in the presence of one of these centuries-old trees there in the Northwest.
They might visit me on field trips, inattentive and giggling at first, but eventually sitting around me respectfully, asking me what Thomas Alva Edison was really like, and what were my feelings when primitive man first crossed the land bridge from Eurasia over to the North American continent.
You would like them to say later, when describing the visit to their friends, “it was like stepping into another world, another time!”
Once the historic designation was conferred upon me, I hope that I would not carry myself with unseemly pride, though the temptation will be strong at the grocery store and spirits store to whip out the Register of Historic Sites, point out my name, and ask if this qualifies me for any discounts.
While waiting for a seat at a crowded local restaurant it may or may not be beneath me to fume in a corner and mutter, “to think that this is the way a national monument gets treated; for shame, for shame!”
All in all I think it will be worth the trouble of sending in the paperwork and seeing where it gets me. And there are those tax breaks.
