Time Passes

 

My Grandmother was known as "The Lady with the Ford" as she toodled around town in her Model T. 

As a kid I used to read "Fifty Years Ago" in "Ladies Home Journal" and think how much my grandmother who at the time was in her seventies had seen such as:

• Telephones
• Cars
• Electricity and lights in houses
• Ankles showing
• Prohibition
• Women voting
• Television 
• The end of smallpox and some childhood diseases
  

I wondered what in 50 years there would be left to discover if anything. I was wrong: I've seen:

• Space travel
• Internet
• Portable telephones
• Electronic books
• Electronic almost everything
• Communications through computers including mass calls
• The end of many diseases such as polio and other childhood diseases
• Gay marriage 
• Biracial marriage

Both lists are just a start. 

I wish my grandmother were around so I could ask her what she thought about the changes. I'd also hope she'd be making a New England boiled dinner, red flannel hash, bird cookies, etc. I'd like to do a jigsaw puzzle with her too as it snowed outside.

Some of the the new stuff I love. Word processing and other software that makes life easier. Other things I hate like the need of people to be in constant contact with their phones rather than with life around them.

I've gone through wars and become more and more a peacenik. I no longer buy the propaganda having read far too much history and seen far too much. I shudder at the route of my birth country but throughout history countries have risen and fallen.

As much as I would like to see what life would be in another 50 years, I won't be around. It will probably be more of the same because the problem is the ongoing stupidity of the human race along with its cleverness...it's too clever for its own good.