dual personalities

The end of September is upon us! This busy week has flown by and the rest of the year, I have no doubt, will fly by as well. This weekend I will do my best to slow down.

I’m going to finish my Mitford book. I’m going to organize some stuff at home. Maybe I’ll get the OM to drive down to Jefferson Barracks with me. They have a Civil War Museum there which I have never visited. I was reminded of it when I read that on September 30 in 1843 Ulysses Grant arrived at Jefferson Barracks, south of St. Louis, for assignment to the 4th Infantry.

While stationed there, a West Point classmate, Frederick Dent, Jr., invited Grant to his parent’s home, White Haven, on the Gravois Road. After Dent went west with his regiment, Ulysses continued to visit the Dents–and in particular his sister, Julia Dent. When he was assigned to duty in the Southwest, Ulysses had to make a mad ride from Jefferson Barracks, perilously crossing the Des Peres River at flood stage to say goodbye to Julia.

He arrived at White Haven wet and disheveled. Then, in Grant’s words, “I mustered up courage to make known, in the most awkward manner imaginable, the discovery I had made on learning that the 4th infantry had been ordered away from Jefferson Barracks.”

Julia’s recollection was more romantic: “He declared his love and told me that without me life would be insupportable.” He gave her his ring and she gave him a lock of her hair.

It was quite a while before they saw each other again. Four years later on August 22, 1848, they were married at Julia’s home in St. Louis. They were a devoted couple through thick and thin, through war and separation, and all the way to the White House.

BTW, there is a new biography of Grant. Here’s the review in the New Yorker. I don’t think I’ll be reading this book, even though it is actually pretty positive. No one today really gets U.S. Grant except maybe John Keegan:

“In 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, Grant, aged thirty-nine, with four children at home and scarcely a penny in the bank, had made no mark on the world and looked unlikely to do so, for all the boom conditions of mid-century America. His Plymouth Rock ancestry, his specialist education, his military rank, which together must have ensured him a sheltered corner in the life of the Old World, counted for nothing in the New. He lacked the essential quality to be what Jacques Barzun has called a “booster,” one of those bustling, bonhomous, penny-counting, chance-grabbing optimists who, whether in the frenetic commercial activity of the Atlantic coast, in the emergent industries of New England and Pennsylvania or on the westward-moving frontier, were to make America’s fortune. Grant, in his introspective and undemonstrative style, was a gentleman, and was crippled by the quality.” (The Mask of Command)

In other news I went to see the Steve McQueen movie last night. I enjoyed it a lot because it was two hours of Steve McQueen. There were some hokey elements to it–Pastor Greg driving his green Shelby Mustang around–but it was well done. The movie suggests that although he had made it to the top of his profession and was a “superstar,” Steve was longing for meaning in his life, and finally at the end of his life, he found it in his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. It wasn’t a deathbed conversion. He found religion when he took flying lessons and became friends with his flight instructor, a Christian family man who talked to him and took him to church. He was planning to move to Ketchum, Utah with his 3rd wife and run the general store (sounds like a good plan to me) but he was diagnosed with cancer and never got the chance. Wonderful Billy Graham came and met him on the private jet that was going to take him to Mexico for some alternative treatment.

Anyway, I have felt a bond with Steve ever since I had a dream when I was in the 5th grade where I gave him a tour of Middlebury College.

Guess I know what I’ll be watching this weekend. Have a good one!