Daily Archives: January 19, 2010

The Heath Historical Society had a number of artifacts from our Colonial Fort William Henry Shirley on display in a crowded former school house. I remember a musket ball with teeth marks on it from a soldier chewing it during primitive surgery- but that can’t be true. It seems exactly the sort of story my father would tell me, planting it as truth in my mind, making history vivid and concrete- not just a turn of phrase but an actual object. Was it really there?

I’m trying to get my next guest post together for the Desk Set, but I feel a clammy listlessness come over me each time I sit at the computer. Instead I dreamed all weekend, detailed quasi-practical dreams. Looking at apartment after apartment each flawed in its own special way. Carefully reading a job offer to be a Maritime History Librarian at a small Christian college in Kentucky. Looking at students’ art at a large gallery in Brooklyn full of people who I don’t quite know. Work. Lots of it.

Time for the musket ball.