Finally, she wrote the final draft on the last day before the paper was due. All in one long sitting. Nearing lunch hour, she was bent over the desk, fresh java warming her hands, as she read through the draft she had just finished pounding out on the keyboard. Cassie had written it in one felled swoop, without so much as a break, except to periodically sip on cold coffee. ‘It reads well,‘ she thought to herself.

A few years ago, while doing homework, I asked my father what a ‘consultant’ did. His answer, which soared right over my head, was this: “A consultant is someone who takes the watch from your wrist …and then tells you what time it is.” That memory flashed into my head as I sat in my father’s duct-taped office chair, fingertips hovering over the computer keyboard, just waiting for an idea to hit.

I knew from the outset that this paper would be all about Havre de Grace, and its most legendary historical figures, Peter Minuit, Godfrey Harmer, General Lafayette, and even General Washington.

The opening few paragraphs came easily. Too easy. Here I was, putting into print a set of facts and legends, intended for my teacher to read and grade. Yet wasn’t it that same teacher from whom I had learned those facts and legends? Maybe I’ll be a consultant one day, I found myself thinking.

I knew I needed to reach beyond the readily apparent. Any kid who has ever ventured into the McDonalds on Market Street has stared blankly at the two tall ships of Peter Minuit, sailing proudly across the scrubbable, faded vinyl wallcovering in the dining area. Burned into their brains since infancy are images of exhausted sailors manhandling the yardarms and running rigging of the Kalmar Nyckel and Fogel Grip.

No, writing about the exploits of brave explorers from the Dutch West Indies Company would simply not do. Even if their string of fearless and heroic efforts to settle New Netherland – and, within it, New Sweden – led in no small way to the founding of Havre de Grace. Even if French General Lafayette gave it its name, and General Washington stayed here overnight on his journey from Mount Vernon to New York to accept his inauguration as the first President of the United States.

I scrapped my first, second, and third drafts of the above-described typecast renditions of this report, tossed them in the trash, and went for a bike ride to clear my head. Something told me to head to the Concord Lighthouse. Once there, that same inner voice told me to study the narrow mouth of the pass. A whispering voice guiding me, coaxing me. I fell asleep there, at the foot of the tower, and had a crazy dream.

So where do I begin? If I were to ask you, Ms. Phillips, you would surely reply ‘at the beginning.’ But what I came to learn from my time on the banks of the Susquehanna was that there is no beginning, just as there is no end. How would Peter Minuit respond if he was instructed to navigate the globe ‘from the beginning?’ Just where does the earth begin or end?

I am speaking geographically, of course. But on a personal level, the swirling and intertwined concepts that danced and pranced around my fatigued skull convinced me that we are all part of a whole, much bigger than any one of us. Whether that is a Greater Good or a Lesser Good, is worthy of discussion but for another day.

My short visit to the lighthouse blessed me with several important metaphors about life. I shall try to explain each, as briefly and clearly as I can. What they all have in common is the scene that lay out before me; of a river pouring into a bay. Innocent enough, one might think.

For starters, Chesapeake Bay is fed by far more than just one river along its shores. There must be scores, if not hundreds, of rivers that fill the Chesapeake Bay. And the Bay itself is but one of many that open to the oceans and great seas of our globe.

Each river is, in turn, fed by many streams; each stream by many brooks; each brook by countless inlets, lakes, ponds, and puddles peppered along its length. And those standing pools of water get their droplets from the clouds which, in turn, draw their moisture from the great oceans.

I learned another word from this observation: interdependence. Each part of the system depends on and is depended upon by the other parts of the system. And as I pondered this truth, I thought of your parameters for this paper. Figure out if, and how, important figures in Maryland history affected me. What I came to realize was that my history, and the history of everyone who came before, and will come after, are all interconnected, and interdependent.

If Peter Minuit had not convinced the Swedish government to fund his exploration, his nephew, Godfrey Harmer would not have been chosen to captain the Fogel Grip. Had Harmer not settled on our shores, Havre de Grace might not be here. Had my parents not moved here early in their lives, I might not be here. Somewhere in your family history must be some string of events that explain why you are here, Ms. Phillips, teaching at Havre de Grace High School.

The next metaphor deals with the struggle of the river and bay to contribute to one another. A river is called a tributary for a reason; it contributes to the volume of the body of water that it supplies. Without the river, the bay (and ocean beyond) would be a dry basin. Yet, without the bay and ocean, there would be no source for the river, through evaporation. They each need one another. There is so much to learn from their symbiotic (I had to look that word up) relationship.

Yet, at their meeting, they resist one another. Odd standoff, it seems to me. And isn’t that but another life lesson? Those upon whom we depend, from whose lifeblood we gain our very existence, we fight so ferociously in our foolish youth. And of those who will one day launch their life stories from the lapping shores of our final embankments, we hardly give a thought along our way.

Instead, we think only of ourselves, for that has been our nurturing. Survival of the fittest; each man for himself; dog-eat-dog world; may the best man win; might makes right; me, myself, and I.

I fear that it is only in the twilight years when the end is much closer than the start that we allow ourselves to consider the cosmic and spiritual interconnectedness of all humanity. Indeed, it is easily seen that humanity is like the great ocean complex, for the Atlantic and Pacific and Indian and all other great oceans are but one boundless sea.

And the history of each country, of each culture, of each religion, is like a river that feeds into the depths of the human sea. And each family’s story is but a stream that feeds one or more of those rivers. And my particular story? Well, it is but a brook that feeds the family stream.

And what of the infinite number of water droplets that comprise my brook? Ah, these are the multitude of countless choices I make across a lifetime. Each day, each hour, each minute I make choices. Even choosing not to choose is a choice. And those choices all add up, eventually defining and becoming who I am at my core. What I stand for. Or, what I stood for, as my progeny will see it.

The third metaphor is the inseparable essence of who I am, who my parents were, and who my children will be. Of whom we all are, as humans. Much like the droplets of water that pass from pond to ocean, are they not all made of the same raw ingredients? More broadly, I realize that all of us are made of the same stuff. Maybe that is what is meant in the holy books about being God’s children.

I’m not especially spiritual, but I think I believe that we are all essentially the same. That is, we are each unique in our personality, dreams, skills, passions, and feelings. And yet, at the same time, we are all equal, no one greater or lesser than the other.

The blood that flows in my body once flowed in my mother’s veins and my father’s arteries. Much of my personality was formed by them. Many of my opportunities and challenges, alike, are a direct reflection of the choices they made along the way.

And it was this one realization, more than any other, that brought me to tears, as I stared out at the competing, struggling waters of the inlet. My parents’ decisions, their life choices, their circumstances – what were they? It dawned on me (actually, given the hour, it technically dusked on me) that I knew so little, so pathetically little, about either of their life stories.

When I think of all of the hours I sat by my mother’s hospital bed or steered my father’s wheelchair through the gardens at the convalescent center, I squandered so many precious opportunities to ask them. To fill in the blanks I now have.

In the days following my bike ride, I embarked on some serious investigation. I read through every scrap of paper I could find in my father’s closets, files, and shoeboxes. I carefully turned the weathered pages of my mother’s scrapbook and journal. I read her diaries. I visited places my parents frequented, just to learn whatever I could.

As just one example, I met an old lady named Selma, who has worked at Havre’s downtown voting precinct for over forty years. With a twinkle in her faded eyes, she fondly recalled my mother’s passion for American democracy, for the importance and power of the individual vote. For her tireless and compassionate efforts as an election worker, handing out ballots and aiding first-time voters confused about the process.

I want to thank you for this assignment. Only now do I appreciate that its role in my life story is not simply to secure for me a rightful spot in that proud parade across the auditorium stage on graduation night. Rather, it will stand as a lifelong pivot moment, a midcourse correction that will radically and profoundly affect the very trajectory of my life.

That leads me to one last philosophical observation, still about the timeless flow of water, as a metaphor for life itself. When one stops to think about destiny, an unavoidable question is posed. Do we create our destiny, or do the destinies of others before us, in the end, create us? I just spoke about life trajectories. But do we define them at the outset, and have a clear vision of where we wish to end up? Or do we simply end up at some final state, the consequence of infinite, compound choices – many made by others?

My conclusion – or, at least, my current thought – is that it depends on the individual. Some people, I think they’re called C-types, pretty much follow a script written by others … by parents, by teachers, by society’s norms and expectations, and such.

For them, the broad arc of their life trajectory is a gentle curve, climbing from birth and youth to the zenith of middle age, and then downward toward the final hours. For them, decisions are of short-range importance, mainly transactional, many for the comfort of the moment.

Then there are the A-types, the ambitious and self-driven, the ones with a limitless passion for some cause or belief. They cannot be stopped in their pursuit of an end goal they hold firmly in mind, a dream that haunts them.

But either trajectory can be upended – often is upended – by some pivotal moment that utterly jolts the path into a different direction. Rarely are such moments of our creation. Instead, they seem to happen to us, like that voice whispering, ‘Build it and they will come.’

The assignment of this paper is one such pivotal moment, Ms. Phillips. And for this reason alone, I simply cannot thank you enough. I do not know precisely how, but I am certain that it will matter so profoundly and deeply to the strength and substance of my life fabric. Of this, I am certain.

I am convinced that whatever my life’s course, when I trace it back to its starting point, it will be at the water’s edge, at the foot of Concord Lighthouse. Such is the way lives evolve and unfold. Everyone’s opening chapter is to be found in the middle of the stories of countless (and often nameless and faceless) others.

And by adopting this outlook, I find it ridiculous – at once, laughable and maddening – that humans fight one another over what are essentially flawed and limited perceptions. Take immigration, for instance.

Here, in America, except for Native Americans, we are all either the descendants of immigrants, or ourselves immigrants. Truthfully, even the Native Americans must have first migrated here from the birthplace of humanity, between the Tigris and Euphrates.

So, doesn’t that mean that it boils down to a matter of timing? Because I came here earlier, I can therefore bar someone else from coming here later? But what if I were the one arriving later? Isn’t that one of the lessons to be learned from the Susquehanna and Chesapeake dance?

We humans fight over territory, over religious views, over skin color, over sexual orientation, over money, over and over. Yet, we can claim no decisive influence over any of them. Do we choose our skin color when we are born? Do we choose our nationality when we are born? Do we choose our gender, or sexual inclinations when we are born? Do we choose the timing of our birth?

It’s like that joke about the guy born on third base, who arrogantly insists that he hit a triple. But for our choices, everything else in our life story constitutes our circumstances. How then can we justify attacking others for merely inheriting the circumstances that befell them? I now understand the verse, ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ It’s all so random. And nothing to get huffy about.

Before I could put the last sentence to this paper, I had to discover as much as I could about the pivotal moments in the lives of my parents, and their parents. Here is a synopsis of what I discovered, after much digging.

Edwin Gilmore: My father was born in Sioux City, Iowa in 1942. At age ten, his family moved to Chicago. In high school, he proudly joined ROTC and the day after turning eighteen, he enlisted in the Army. He did his Boot Camp at Fort Dix, New Jersey in July 1960. He then did two tours of duty in Vietnam, after which the Army assigned him to the Detroit Arsenal in Warren, Michigan.

Concerned about his father’s declining health, he quit the Army and returned to Chicago in 1968. It was there that he met my mother. After they married, my father took a machinist job at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in June 1969. Two months later, my older sister, Mary, was born. Eighteen months later, I completed our family.

Dad did well at Aberdeen, promoted to Line Supervisor in 1970. But unbeknownst to any of us, there was an ominous storyline being written in the background. Those several, undisclosed chemical leaks at Aberdeen – that are so well known to anyone living in this region, and that culminated in the Pilot Plant’s closure in March 1986 – managed to poison my father.

Through the grapevine, Dad had heard rumors of deadly toxins right around the time I was born and immediately decided to move the family here, to Havre de Grace. That would have been June of 1972. Dad retired from the military in August 1987, with full disability. That’s the least they could do for him. But not enough, for as I write this, he is down the street, dying, suffering a painfully slow demise. Small consolation that those in charge of this mess, the Aberdeen Three, were convicted three months ago.

Billy Gilmore: My grandfather was born in 1910, in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He graduated high school in 1928 and got an engineering degree from Boston College four years later. He was immediately hired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to work on the Cape Cod Canal project.

Ten years later, he was transferred to Sioux City to work on the Pick–Sloan Project, a multi-decade effort to straighten the Missouri River through a series of parallel canals. Ten years hence, in 1952, he was re-assigned to Chicago, to work on the military’s top secret NIKE project, which involved building 20 missile silos on the shores of Lake Michigan. It was this latest move that brought my father to Illinois at age ten.

Sean Gilmer: This would be my great-grandfather. All I know about him is that he was born in Ireland in 1884 and emigrated to the United States in 1901. He settled in Dorchester, a suburb of South Boston, with a high Irish population.

From these three men, one can see the kind of multi-generational continuum of life I wrote about, above. Surely there must have been pivotal moments in each of their lives. Something must have inspired Sean to risk the high seas at age seventeen, in pursuit of a better life. Something must have inspired Billy, a first-generation American, to get a college education. Something must have inspired Edwin to devote his life to the military.

Ramona Williams: Less is known about my mother. She was born in Chicago in 1949, graduating high school in 1967. From stories Selma related to me, my mother caught the politics bug in high school. Right after graduation, she joined the Bobby Kennedy campaign. But following his assassination in June 1968, she redirected her energies toward supporting Hubert Humphrey.

It was at this early stage of life that she started volunteering as an election worker, a passion she would pursue until her health would no longer allow it. My mother was a sickly child and only later in life diagnosed as a ‘brittle diabetic.’ This condition sent her glucose levels skyrocketing or plummeting. She spent the last ten years of her life mostly bedridden, my sister and I catering to her while my father worked long days at Aberdeen.

Mom passed away in 1987, dying at our Thanksgiving table. I know virtually nothing about her parents, except that their names might have been Stuart Williams and Sandra Fairlain.

I end this paper where it began, with a pensive observation. We are each, products of the experiences and choices and circumstances of those who came before. In my case, the Maryland historical figures who most influenced me are both obvious and unexpected.

My parents, and their parents, are central to my life story. I now realize that to the extent I choose to carry on with their passions, I become their living legacy. It occurred to me that my parents were two sides of the same patriotic coin. My father fought for American democracy, and my mother practiced it. Both loved their country and cherished the gracious gift of representative government that was most certainly divinely inspired within the minds of the Founding Fathers.

Likewise, if I live my life well — wisely, lovingly, passionately, and purposefully – I hope that I will be some small yet significant inspiration to those who might follow my lead. They need not necessarily be in my bloodline. They might simply be precious souls whose lives intertwined with mine.

And that brings me to the other Maryland historical figure who most influenced me, the unexpected one. That would be you, Ms. Phillips. You have played such a key role in my life, at times, surrogate mother, always a patient ear. As a steadfast taskmaster who demanded more from me than I knew I had within me.

I cannot thank you enough for being there for me over the last four years. If it weren’t for you, I don’t know how I could have survived my mother’s death, my father’s dying, and a big sister moving away. But most of all, thank you for this writing assignment. I believe it to be my first pivotal moment. I wonder how many more I will have in my lifetime.

I wish you well, Ms. Phillips. And I rejoice when I stop to think of all those students yet to enter your classroom; how lucky they will unknowingly be. (And, no, I’m not sucking up, just to get a passing grade.)

May God bless you.

 Cassie Gilmore

 May 31, 1989