MILLENNIUM ESSAY CONTEST WINNERS; LOOKING BACK: NOSTALGIC ENGLAND

How can one speak of our past nostalgically? The United States is still relatively a new nation. 1,000 years ago Native Americans were here.

Never having done my genealogy and having merely a vague idea, I can only write of what I identify with or what I know for a surety.

I wanted to think Christ and the early Christians came 1,000 years before. But the truth is they were before this millennium.

So I turn nostalgically to my probable English-ancestry country, land of King Arthur and his round table. Was this too, before A.D. 1000? If so, how about Robin Hood who stole from the rich and gave to the poor?

A lot of my historical perspective comes from the movies Hollywood has created, as may be many of yours. For instance, Camelot and many Robin Hoods. We even have an American presidency referred to as Camelot.

This year showed us two very good Joan of Arc movies.

Most of us here have to particularly grateful to Columbus for missing India, for having discovered a land that would become a place to worship as one's conscience dictates and to having a better life!

But life in merry old England wasn't so bad and has brought Americans nostalgically to renaissance festivals in many parts of the United States and madrigal dinners.

Following the Pilgrims and others, my husband's own genealogy boasts of an ancestor who claimed for ownership one-half of Maine. Imagine! His genealogy also tells of a colorful history of a great-great-grandmother in the Carolinas who hit a bear up side the head with a skillet, bringing about its demise.

Back to England in the early 1800s, we were blessed to have Jane Austen preserve the middle class in her writings. Movies of the 1990s included "Sense and Sensibility" and "Emma."

The 1800s brought us one of the greatest United States presidents, Abraham Lincoln.

My grandmother, before her death, led my father, mother and myself to a field in LaFayette, Tenn., to where an ancestor who had fought in the Civil War is buried. His hardly readable gravestone was in a tree-covered field owned by a farmer.

Bringing us to the 1900s, veterans would have us remember World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and Desert Storm.

I think back to the 1930s and the Depression where, through religious faith and through farming, both sets of my grandparents made it through.

I dabble a little with writing poetry and recently gave this poem to my father on a plaque:

Fade Out

Is getting old fading out,

Is that what it's all about?

The promise of the spring is ... no more.

Soon I will be of things from my

Children and grandchildren's lore,

And this too, my friend, will fade out.

I think of my Civil War ancestor's grave in Tennessee, memories of little John Kennedy at his father's grave site, fields covered with crosses and surely must realize this too will fade out, as the millennium just past has.