I've been reading lately about time and our perception of it. My interest was piqued by learning that Cleopatra lived closer in time to the moon landing in 1969 than she did to the construction of the pyramids. She was born about 2500 years after the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza... and about 2000 years before the moon landing.
I find this sort of discussion fascinating. Here's another one: the Stegosaurus was older to the Tyrannosaurus rex than the T. rex is to us. So that means the Flintstones were just lying?
The Wright Brothers' first successful flight was in December of 1903. Just 66 years later, we made it to the moon (unless, of course, you're a moon-landing denier and conspiracy theorist, in which case, just go away.) My grandparents were alive for both the first flight and the moon landing.
My great-grandfather Clark Wilcox, around the turn of the 20th century, was a young postal clerk at the post office in Elmira, New York. A frequent customer was Mark Twain. Twain was very old (he died in 1910) and great-grandpa was born in the late 1860s. The two had frequent conversations. Here's the remarkable thing to me: Great-grandpa died in 1963. I remember him pretty well. So I have one degree of separation from Mark Twain! Great-grandpa Wilcox became the Historian of Chemung County, New York.
Somewhere around here I have a picture of me sitting on great-grandpa's lap, but I can't lay my hands on it just now. But the whole thing has me thinking about time, and the perception of time. I was born in 1954. That's 13 years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which precipitated the United States' entry into World War 2. We dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki nine years before I was born. Growing up (to the extent I ever grew up at all) in the 1960s, of course I knew about Pearl Harbor and the atomic bombs, but to me it was ancient history just like World War 1 was at that point.
Of course, Pearl Harbor was one of those events that everyone who was alive remembers. Just like 9/11. But 9/11 was 23 years ago. That's ten years more than the distance in time between Pearl Harbor and me. I was 47 when the 9/11 attacks took place, and, like most people, I can remember every detail of that awful day.
I can also remember the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I was in Mrs. Spelt's 4th grade class at Elizabeth Green Elementary School in Newington, Connecticut. I didn't really fully absorb the significance of that event, but I remember it vividly. It was the first time I remember that the grown-ups didn't know what to do and how to react. We all just stayed for several days in a state of shock – much like we did post-9/11
My wife Tammy is 7 years younger than I. That doesn't seem like much, and in terms of time, it isn't. But we discussed it the other day, and I learned that she had no memory of the JFK assassination at all. Not too surprising. She was a little over a year old at the time.
I'm not entirely sure why I find this stuff so fascinating, but, well, I do. I hope you do too.
I find it interesting to think of all of the changes many have gone through at different times. I'm probably a few months older than you are (born in December '53, and in 5th grade for JFK's assassination), and considered it fascinating to have known people who had nothing but a radio, but then lived through the invention of television. But then I stopped to think about my own life: I learned to type on a typewriter in high school, research in a library, and here we are with information at our fingertips! I first started using a computer in the mid-80s, learned the internet (through dial-up) in the early '90s, and now? I can stream a show or movie on a TV that's probably smarter than I am.