Where Have You Gone, Joshua Chamberlain? :: Free Essays Online

Where Have You Gone, Joshua Chamberlain? To some, it may be considered a minor inconvenience. To others, a drawn-out ordeal with annoying aspects, but one they realize will be completed shortly. Yet to some, to a select, elite group of young, paranoid, and, lets face it, broke, lot of people known as college students, its a travesty. An impossibility. An object traveling deep into the Void, never to be seen again. This trip into the parallel domain to which some objects traverse without return is known as The Loss of a Package Sent by your Parents. It wasnt a package of cookies -- oh no, it couldnt be something sweet, simple, and purely meant as a tasty surprise. Nor was it a warm, knit blanket, something to keep me toasty warm during long, cold nights of studying in my fairly-heated dorm room. Mail accidentally displace to my home address instead of my brand-new, thoroughly unfamiliar college address it was not. It was a package of books, hand-picked by my dad, for my f irst college presentation, discussing the life of a Civil War general, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. My sire is somewhat of a self-taught expert on the subject. A man who has been that annoying voice in the back of a group tour, constantly asking questions and reservation comments (this he-usually-makes-fun-of-this-person day took place at the Joshua Chamberlain Museum in Brunswick, Maine). A man who has scoured every remote bookstore location in Maine, searching, praying, for another addition to his show of scores of books concerning the late, great Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine. This past summer, he hit the jackpot. While walking in Freeport, Maine, land of the wondrous L.L. Bean store, my father stumbled upon a low shanty of a store with a meager painted sign which read BOOKS 20TH MAINE. With bated breath, my dad entered the store. And there, among rows of Civil War memorabilia, regiment flags and highly overpriced bronze replicas of battles such as Little Roun d Top, Dan Beaulieu found heaven. To this day, I wonder if he breathed once in that store, for fear that a puff of air might blow away his Holy Grail of bookstores. After a very exciting hour of buying T-shirts with inspiring quotes