Where Have You Gone, Joshua Chamberlain?

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, let’s face it, broke, lot of people known as college students, it’s a travesty. An impossibility. An object traveling deep into the Void, never to be seen again. This trip into the parallel universe to which some objects traverse without return is known as: The Loss of a Package Sent by your Parents.

It wasn’t a package of cookies -- oh no, it couldn’t 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 sent 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 first college presentation, discussing the life of a Civil War general, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

My father 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 making 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 collection 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 small 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 extremely overpriced bronze replicas of battles such as Little Round 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