By Joe Darby
My brother-in-law Charley turned 90-years-old earlier this week.
For some time he’d been looking forward to the achievement, and by gosh, he made it with flying colors. I missed the family celebration marking the event because I’d signed up months earlier for a Civil War battlefield tour and I was on the road for his party.
But I called the young man on his special day and I will soon visit him and give him the same kind of present that I always give him — a book on history. Yep, his eyes are still good enough to read, which he loves to do.
We lost my sister, his wife, almost a decade ago, when she was about to celebrate her 80th birthday. As any senior citizen can tell you, getting old ain’t necessarily fun, but it’s a whole lot better than the alternative. We lost another sister to lung cancer when she was only 47. She’d been a heavy smoker.
It’s really kind of strange to reach an advanced age. It’s amazing how far back you can remember things. For example, my companion on the recent battlefield tour was a guy whom I’ve been friends with since the fifth grade. Now that was in 1952 — 65 years ago!
To me, it does of course seem like a long time ago, because it was. But to a young person, that’s ancient history. Let me give a comparison and you’ll see what I mean. I graduated from high school in 1960. If some old man had talked to me at that time about something that had happened to him 65 years earlier, that would have been 1895. That, to me, in 1960, would surely have seemed like an ancient time.
And things that are still fresh in our memory already seem like times past to young people. Most of our college students here at NSU were little more than toddlers when the 9-11 attacks occurred. And the horrible event happened before the birth of most high school freshmen and sophomores.
The passage of time itself seems relative. Einstein proved that time is in fact flexible, but I’m not sure exactly how he proved it. My strengths were always in the social studies, not science.
But you can come up with some funny things when you start to think about time. I was having an insomnia night not too long ago, when I started playing a little game in my head. I was born in 1941, 76 years ago. So I thought it would be interesting to figure out what was happening 76 years before my birth. That year would be 1865.
Yikes! The year the Civil War ended is just as close to the year of my birth as the year of my birth is to me now. That puts things in an interesting perspective. Then I started playing the game with the birth years of other members of my family.
I won’t go through all of them, of course, but Mother and Daddy were born in 1909. Let’s see, that was 108 years ago and 108 years before their birth it was 1801. My gosh! Thomas Jefferson had just been elected president and the Louisiana Purchase would not occur for another two years. Incredible. You might have fun trying this little game on yourself and your family.
Another aspect of time and aging is that time seems to speed up. When I was a kid, it seemed a school year lasted forever. Now, it seems that Christmas rolls around every six months or so and that football season, which in reality is from September to January, lasts for about four weeks.
And the speeding up of time means we get older really fast. Even if I make 90 like Charley, which I surely doubt I will, that’s only 14 years from now and 14 years go by awfully quick.
But, like I said, when you consider the alternative…
That’s why we geezers and geezerettes need to enjoy every day as much as we can. The days are dwindling down, but we shall make the most of them, right?