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Past, present and future meet in the seasons of Ann Arbor

The title of this column is "On the Record," and as a history major and a journalist, I've spent much of the past four years either unearthing old records or making new ones. I have combed through 1830s court opinions, diaries of Hitler Youth members and 1940s school bulletins. And I have put pen to paper -- or fingers to keyboard -- on strikes by baseball players and TAs, on Presidents Clinton, Duderstadt and Wainess.

Old records and new ones. I get asked fairly often why I am majoring in history -- and while there are many answers, most of them boil down to my date with the Constitution. Or to a little girl in Topeka, Kan., on whose behalf Thurgood Marshall denounced segregated schools before the Supreme Court. Or to The Michigan Daily from November 17, 1961, which reported on the Inter-Quadrangle Council's fight to allow women to live in East, West and South Quads.

To major in history is to study the past, and to study the past is to find a connection to the present. Discovering that my South Quad room was meant for men explains why I never saw more than the top of my head in the mirror over the sink and had to reach up to dial the phone. Great and small issues alike come out in black and white, pressed into the pages of the past.

There can be a danger in burying oneself in those pages: the danger of getting lost. Many people -- particularly on this campus -- speak nostalgically of historical times. Some invoke "The Sixties" at every possible turn: Things were better then, they say. People had passion then, they say. It was an amazing time, they say.

No doubt. But "The Sixties" are not some kind of magic spell against the evils of the present day. Neither are the '50s, which others consider the prototype for the American dream. High birth rate, few divorces, a lovely home in the suburbs. Daddy contributing to the economy and Mommy at home with the kids. What could be better?

If there is a right and a wrong way to study history, this attitude -- looking for paradise -- is the wrong way. It is cowardly, a way of hiding in another, supposedly better time. And it shortchanges the present by denying that we too are worthy of record.

In the most obvious way, the past is gone forever. Individuals pass away, taking with them their particular qualities and situations. But in another way, the record repeats itself continuously -- and nowhere is this more evident than in a university town. It's why so many University alums come back to Ann Arbor, again and again: The city, in order to compensate for a constantly overturning population, has acquired a certain timelessness. If it's a Saturday in October, you can count on a Michigan football game; January sees ice covering the `M' on the Diag; the end of April brings graduation and a whole new set of alums. And the next fall greets another class, rising up to fill the empty spaces.

It is this round of seasons and classes in which history is made. Years from now, people will study us the same way we now study others. It's difficult to predict what they will pick out -- will it be Jake Baker? Duderstadt? Northwestern in the Rose Bowl?

Does it matter? When the Inter-Quadrangle Council met in 1961, I doubt that paving the way for me, specifically, to live in South Quad was on their minds. I doubt they would have predicted that someone, 35 years later, would be reading about it and making a connection.

But the connection is there. When you're a senior, you start to see the past and the future converging on your present, and you start to wonder where your connections fit in. History is all over this place, if you can look past the construction and find it. It's in the bricks, the library books, the pages of Dailies past.

Today's record is tomorrow's history. In a way, I think, nobody ever really leaves Ann Arbor. We all drop pieces of ourselves behind us, waiting for someone to come along and pick them up.

-- Julie Becker can be reached over e-mail at jhb@umich.edu.