Frazier Museum

On Saturday, I accompanied forty-two ninth and tenth graders to the Frazier International History Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. Housed downtown in a beautiful three-story brick building is a collection of arms and armor from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, from the tournament and joust to the repeating rifles of Marlin and Winchester; from the long sword and bow to the wheellock, from Agincourt to Little Big Horn.

The Frazier Museum, home of two world-class collections (Britain's royal armouries including the Tower of London and the Frazier Permanent Collection), is clean, organized and filled with placards denoting king, country, context and significance. Every forty-five minutes, a live demostration is held, or, as they like to call it, a historic interpretation. To augment these interpretations and give depth to the arm and armor within the context of history, are a multitude of recorded media set up in booths, in corners and in theaters. Each floor also displays several life-sized dioramas, bringing life to these instruments of death and destruction.

Upon arrival, we divided our students into groups of ten, attended our welcome presentation of rule and regulation and then quartered the museum. I took my ten students to the third floor and we proceeded to work our way down. What happened next, I am ashamed to say, I should have anticipated, but did not. In short, my group, as did the others, took in 1000 years of history in what could only be called a fly-by. To follow my group at their pace meant to read nothing, to watch nothing. Displays were to their minds and hearts as rain to hard soil.

When we boarded the bus two hours later, my first thought was to come back, to spend the day to fully appreciate the treasures of time housed here. To see beyond the wood and metal, and perhaps grasp some insight or at least some comprehension of man and the need to draw lines and draw blood, something happening today as it did for virtually every generation before us. We were in a house of death, of weapons build by men, by the minds of men, commissioned by kings, to do as all arms are meant, to maim, kill and destroy. Yet, on this day, I was tethered quickly from display to display and floor to floor, pulled by laughter and horseplay.

I don't judge those kids. I'm almost positive, at that age, I would have moved just as quickly, with just as little desire to understand these static displays of a history I knew from movies and actors. But it made me think of age and eyes and the cartography of time, of how our eyes change, of how they hold the same objects in such different esteem depending on station in life. Where when our own book of history has a history, perhaps then, we relate to what history holds, when we know the turns and decisions and choices we made, and their consequences, and we know these things not from a book, or a lecture, or a parent, but we know them by divorce, by losing a job, by the unexpected and premature death of loved ones, when the dawn of our life is now pursuing dusk and we stand on the deck of our house and realize, maybe for the first time, that night is coming and it cannot be stopped. Perhaps then, our eyes change. Perhaps then, we ask questions not asked before and a jousting tournament is something more than just a jousting tournament.