In time, even death itself might be abolished.

I was sending an email to a friend today, and I wrote, "Do you ever wonder if there is another time period you should have, or could have lived in? It's something my friend Dane and I used to talk about on occasion when I lived in Utah. My first major in college was in fact History, though I didn't stick with it for very long... but I've allways had a certain affinity for times long gone. "

It made me think of Sgt Barry Benson, a South Carolina veteran in the army of Northern Virgnia. And antecedant of mine. My family originally comes from all over the south, mostly Missouri. Bring Mormon, it always amuses me to hear accounts of pioneer ancestry, because there's more than a decent chance it was my own forefathers driving them out. Barry Benson enlisted in the Confederate army at the age of 18, three months before Sumter and served through Appomatox. (beginning to the end of the Civil War). So when he got around to composing his reminiscences and memoirs, he hoped his words would carry some weight with his decendants for a long time.

Reliving the war in words, he began to wish he could relive it in fact. And he came to believe that he and his fellow soliers, grey and blue, might one day be able to do just that. If not here on earth, then afterwards in Valhalla.

"Who knows," he asked as his narrative drew toward it's close.

"But it may be given to us after this life to meet again in the old quarter. Play chess and drafts and get up soon to answer the morning roll call. To fall in at the tap of the drum for drill and dress parade. And again to hastily don our war gear while the monotonous patter of a long roll summons to battle . Who knows but again the old flags ragged and torn, snapping in the wind may face each other in flutter pursuing and pursued, while the cries of victory fill a summer day. And after the battle, then the slain and wounded will arise and all will meet together under the two flags all sound and well. There will be talking and laughter and cheers and all will say, 'Did it not seem real? Was it not as in the old days?'"

What a thing it must be to look back on a life and have something so epic and glorious in it. There's no undiscovered country for me to discover or new land to tame, now. Perhaps I should have indeed been born in a different time.