Memorial Day being right around the corner, the historic cemetery in my city is running some kind of Civil War remembrance/celebration this weekend. This kind of thing being right up NPR’s alley, my local station did a piece on it today. And all things Civil War being, since the early nineties, associated with Ken Burns’ epic documentary, my local station obviously had to play some Jay Ungar violin under its commentary.

O HOW THAT MUSIC HAUNTS ME.

MamaKitt has already written about our junior high social studies teacher, he of the Dire Straits fandom, and I mentioned in response to that post that we ended up with this teacher again in eleventh grade. Our bare-bones high school was, for once, offering an AP course in US history, and for some reason our teacher bailed halfway through the year. (MK, did we ever know why? Mysterieuse.)

So, we got the junior high dude again. He’d left teaching for a while, but came back to serve as our long-term sub (and ultimately stayed in the position for several years). He came in at the point in our curriculum and in the historical timeline that we were exploring the Civil War — and decided that the best way to teach it to us would be to turn the lights off, plug in the Ken Burns tapes, and sit (doze?) in the back of the room.

Now, the Civil War series was great, and it was certainly all the rage in those first months after it came out, but I sweartogod that teacher taught us NOTHING himself — and let old Ken & Co. do all the work. I don’t recall a single class discussion about the Civil War, but I do recall endless days of trying not to fall asleep in a darkened room, as David McCullough’s dulcet tones and Jay Ungar’s plaintive violin lulled me into a late-morning stupor.

And I recall our creepy teacher walking past MK in the school corridor, leaning his head toward hers and muttering “Mary Chesnut,” in reference to one of the doc’s main characters. Creepy!

Needless to say, the ten thousand hours we spent watching Ken Burns’ version of Civil War history failed to fully prepare us for a comprehensive advanced placement exam on American history. I think we covered the whole twentieth century in a day. Not ideal.

I hadn’t heard “Ashokan Farewell” in years before I heard it today, but I instantly knew what it was. And I instantly grinned and teared up, all at once — remembering this weird experience of my and MK’s youth, as well as feeling, once again, the keening sadness of those notes, that long-ago time, those lost lives and stories.

Yeah, I’m totally going to have to download the Civil War soundtrack this weekend. Happy Memorial Day, everybody.

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