REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK -- Danette Goulet

Some say childhood is wasted on the young. Mine wasn’t -- I lived life

to the fullest as a kid. I mean, I really milked it.

That is what I always thought, anyway.

But as I sat in a classroom in Corona del Mar this week and watched

students try to imagine the battles of Lexington and Concord and the

start of the Revolutionary War, I began to wonder.

I became increasingly aware that I wasted 17 years of living in a town

steeped in our nation’s history.

I grew up in Concord, Mass.

I always thought my parents’ fascination with our town was odd. To me,

it was just this rather elitist town that was too snooty to allow

fast-food restaurants to build there.

In my own little microcosm of a world, I thought children all over the

country were taking field trips just like the ones I was.

Didn’t everyone go to places like the Old North Bridge, Louisa May

Allcott’s House, The Ralph Waldo Emerson House, Walden Pond and the

remains of Henry David Thoreau’s cabin by its shores?

Yeah, guess not. Sorry.

Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t unaware -- they wouldn’t let us be. But

I just didn’t get it.

I even had the gall to be born on April 19.

I was born 198 years to the day after the “shot heard ‘round the

world” began the Revolutionary War, in the very town in which it began.

And do you know what it meant to me? They had a parade on my birthday

each year. On my birthday (a.k.a. Patriot’s Day), there was no work, no

school and everyone in the state was off to celebrate.

In fact, my father portrayed a Concord minuteman and played the fife.

Of course, I think all that was required of modern-day minutemen was to

dress as the patriot militia had, march in parades and reenact battles.

But here’s the kicker -- while my mother was in labor, my dad was

downtown in the streets of Concord, playing the fife.

As my mother went into labor that morning, he dropped her off at the

hospital, told her to wait for him to return, and went and marched in the

parade.

He then returned to the hospital for my birth.

If I had a memory of my first blurry vision of my father, I would have

seen him in his knickers and vest, with a ponytail tied back with a

ribbon and a tricorn atop his head.

I was always very proud of the fact that my birthday was April 19, but

once again -- I just didn’t get it.

I would urge youngsters to take in all the history around them and to

really appreciate where it is they’re growing up -- but if they’re

anything like I was, it wouldn’t do any good, anyway.* DANETTE GOULET

covers education for the Daily Pilot.