Retrospection
by Scott Hardie on October 13, 2012
If I recall the dates correctly, yesterday would have been my grandmother's 100th birthday. She lived to just shy of her 89th, despite a lifetime of chain smoking. I remember her as a sweet, generous woman who liked to laugh and teach me life's simple pleasures; a typical afternoon for us was playing crazy eights and baking cinnamon rolls. There was also an undercurrent of bitter anger to her, something I barely perceived as a child but now recognize in myself as an adult. She faced certain hardships in life to justify it I suppose -- losing her husband to diabetes shortly after he retired, surviving the Great Depression on food stamps and endless hot dogs, having her fingers reattached after a childhood kitchen accident -- but I prefer to remember her happy side.
I bring up these memories to ward off the encroaching fog of history. Some recently unearthed possessions of my distant past, including first-grade report cards (little me aced English but was already behind the class in math), have gotten me thinking about how far removed I am from my own past and family tree. Childhood now feels more like something I read in a book than experienced, as mythologizing certain experiences has been the only way to remember them. If I look back over the years of my life, I see numerous distinct eras that I left behind and moved on from. Each change is associated with the place where I lived more than anything.
I wonder if the children growing up now will get to experience the loss of the past. The Internet and our digital devices record and preserve so much and for so long. Our childhood photos were kept in dusty shoeboxes that were prone to loss; theirs were published for the world to see before they were aware of it, and might remain online forever. We used to be able to move to a new city, start a new job, and begin a new chapter in life, undergoing a natural shedding of memories, a closing of the book on the past. Recently, we have begun to carry the past with us forever, through social media connections to people we should have lost touch with, and digital copies of every thought we once put down into words. I might fear this societal change if I thought we were unequipped to adapt to it, but I'm sure we'll be fine. Our pre-digital life just needs some extra effort to carry ahead into the future, including mine. I need to remember not to forget.
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
Downtown A-Town
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