The Past Not Taken

We make history every day.  From one moment to the next, our decisions-small and large-shape our future and, as we travel along that path, shape our past. How do we want it to read? Should we care? Or should we just get on with our lives and hope for the best? The Past Not Taken is three novellas that show that not all 'authorities' are authoritative.Two roads diverge in a yellow wood...Two young people, their lives stretching out ahead of them, expect very different things out of life after college, but their roads don’t go that way. Curtis is a budding historian at a small university. Melanie is a friend-who-is-a-girl, and she’s in trouble. The kind of trouble that could get her father fired from the small straight-laced university. Melanie asks Curtis for help...sort of. Or did Curtis just offer? In a small archive, documents that could upend American history are found. Did Jefferson suggest that Washington was an ignorant bumpkin and that America bounded by the Constitution would fail?The Past Not Taken explores choices, parenthood and responsibility, and how history is written. Fair warning: it isn’t always based on facts.Two roads diverge in a yellow wood...A young woman knocks on a stranger’s door. Only she isn’t entirely a stranger, and she has nowhere else to go. Her story is inextricably linked with the family behind that door. But the institution that is their livelihood won’t let her stay.How 'authoritative' are the documents that make up the basis of our history? Just because a document appears to be old and is in an archive, does that make it 'proof' of the past?Daughter By Choice explores how the past catches up to everyone. It also explores the nature of being a parent and how there’s so many different kinds of families. It, too, speaks of how history is written and how the long-forgotten can become so important so fast.Whereof what’s past is prologue...A man appears, both known and unknown. He asks for little, but that little means so much. He says a girl’s future is in peril. And what he asks for can be simply devastating for everyone.History likes to teach about 'turning points.' 1776 is one for American history. But what if someone were to declare that 1619 was a more appropriate turning point and waves an archival document around to 'prove' it? Is that document authentic? How do we know?The Past and the Prologue is a story of recurrence, sources, narratives, what it is to be a parent, and, once again, how history is written. History is part legend, part fact, but mostly interpretation of those who have gone before us. We may make history, but it’s the 'authorities' --the scribes and narrators of the future--who write it based on what we leave behind. 3