The People’s History

Time sun rose: certainly well after I woke. Minutes spent stumbling about room looking for the light switch: 0.5 (extraordinary). Minutes spent looking for black tennis shoes: 3 (they were never found)
It’s sixth period, last class of the day, history. Unlike most people my age, I actually like history. All those people, all those stories. I love wondering. Wondering what Napoleon Bonaparte’s favorite color was, if Columbus liked milk with his coffee, whether Marie Antoinette liked to sing while she bathed. I heard someone say once that history is not what happened, history is simply what’s written down. How many little actions, little love songs, quiet kisses got lost in the shuffle, overshadowed by all the big events, the things that get the credit for shaping our world today? Do these smaller things matter less? The everyday gestures, the everyday talk, the everyday smile passed from one stranger to another, do they mean nothing?
The thing about history is that no one ever touches on the fact that the big things, the wars, the discoveries, the famines, the migrations, happened because of something else, a series of something-elses. Take Napoleon for example, he was a man, once a boy, once a baby. He had a mother, a father, who too were once young, once children, once babies. There had to have been a first time they met. What if, on that fated day, his mother spilled some milk, took a few extra minutes to clean up, missed seeing and speaking to his father by a few steps, a few breaths? Where would France be? Where would we be? Where would Sonoma be?
Every one of us is here because of choices, because of simple actions. We shape the future by what we say, what we do. It’s exciting and scary, wielding that power simply by the ability to make decisions, this or that, yes or no. We are all interlinked, our stories woven in and out, together, sometimes knotted, sometimes falling away to cross another person’s path.
If I wrote history textbooks, they’d be made up of the little people and their little lives, little yet large. Perhaps that’s what fiction is for – bringing to life the people who once lived, bringing to life their stories through the eyes of an author. Perhaps the people’s history, the history of the person, is passed on through books and stories and poems.