This morning, Shelly and I rolled ourselves out of bed just before 5:00 to head up to Concord for the official Patriots Day reenactment of the beginning of the Revolutionary War. We had heard that the Colonials and Redcoats would be firing on each other at the Old North Bridge at 6am, and that's just about when we got there. The place had a few people milling around, but mostly it was deserted. It certainly wasn't a battle scene.

It turns out the information on the Concord town website was wrong. The battle reenactment didn't start till 8:30. So we walked down into town and ate at the pancake breakfast sponsored by the Lions Club. About halfway through our meal, about a thousand kids from a certain high school in Naples, Florida showed up. I'm trying not to exaggerate. Maybe it wasn't quite a thousand, but there were at least a good 500 or 600 kids. They seemed to be mostly involved with the marching band and color guard, and we presumed they were going to be marching in the parade later that day. But they sure made our breakfast noisy.

Of course, that was nothing compared to the musket shots and drums that finally showed up at the battleground a few hours later. It was a nice day, and they had a nice little speaker from some national history education society (pointing out that it's great that Massachusetts has Patriots Day as a state holiday (though you only get the day off if (as does Shelly) you work in Suffolk County (Boston)), and she's working hard to get it to become a national holiday (just what we need--more meaningless holidays that everyone ignores). Then the official historian of the current minuteman regiment (it seems there still is an active militia, at least in Concord) got up and narrated the story as the reenacters reenacted.

I use the term "reenacted" loosely. It was more like they walked and stood in the same places where their historic counterparts once walked and stood. This was my first battle reenactment, and maybe movies with all their special effects and close-up excitement have dulled me to a good reenactment, but I didn't find the acting compelling at all. Almost everyone looked bored--even when the Redcoats were firing on the Colonials at 10 yards. No one yelled or moved excitedly, and--most surprisingly--no one fell dead, though four people were killed in the historical version of this skirmish (two on each side). They just marched across the bridge, shot their muskets at each other (which was pretty cool), and then the Brits ran away. It was shorter than I thought it would be, but then I suppose these initial battles of the Revolutionary War were more like scuffles than battles. No one expected to or wanted to fight. I guess I could just do with a little more realism.