technology gap -- becoming ode to gram
I always marveled at the technological and idealogical shifts that my grandmother saw in her lifetime. Born in 1901, she died in 2001. As a child in New England and Quebec, a standard wintertime Sunday afternoon activity was to spend time visiting with family, hopping from one horse-drawn sleigh to another to visit with different folks. From Sabbath afternoons in sun and snow, with horse and bell-strewn sleigh, she lived well into the space age.
As a young mother, she was given the right to vote. She ran a nursery while my grandfather worked in the post office. In her forties, she went to work in quality control in a munitions/armaments factory, to help support the war effort. She raised two children, and watched a baby die over a few months from what I think was spina bifida (now surgically treatable.) She never drank a drop of alcohol in her ninety-nine years. She started her life speaking French, and ended speaking English. She lived so many lives, in so many different circumstances, while the world changed crazily around her.
I wonder if any other generation has seen as much change as this, the circumstances of the world changing in a whirlwind around them in such a way. I think perhaps many others have responded to cataclysmic events -- war, earthquake, volcanic eruptions, exile -- or seen one major technological advance -- the english longbow, grinding of optical glass / lenses, making of iron tools. But to start on foot or on horseback, and to witness the development of cars, airplanes, the Apollos and the space shuttle; to live through two world wars and countless smaller ones, to go from slide-rule and logarhythmic tables to laptops and pdas, to begin in a long home-made skirt dashing around in horse-drawn sleigh and end in store-bought slacks on her daughter's deck watching a sea-plane land on the surface of the lake...
Wow.
As a young mother, she was given the right to vote. She ran a nursery while my grandfather worked in the post office. In her forties, she went to work in quality control in a munitions/armaments factory, to help support the war effort. She raised two children, and watched a baby die over a few months from what I think was spina bifida (now surgically treatable.) She never drank a drop of alcohol in her ninety-nine years. She started her life speaking French, and ended speaking English. She lived so many lives, in so many different circumstances, while the world changed crazily around her.
I wonder if any other generation has seen as much change as this, the circumstances of the world changing in a whirlwind around them in such a way. I think perhaps many others have responded to cataclysmic events -- war, earthquake, volcanic eruptions, exile -- or seen one major technological advance -- the english longbow, grinding of optical glass / lenses, making of iron tools. But to start on foot or on horseback, and to witness the development of cars, airplanes, the Apollos and the space shuttle; to live through two world wars and countless smaller ones, to go from slide-rule and logarhythmic tables to laptops and pdas, to begin in a long home-made skirt dashing around in horse-drawn sleigh and end in store-bought slacks on her daughter's deck watching a sea-plane land on the surface of the lake...
Wow.