HIstory

I'm still traveling back and forth every week between Corpus Christi and Brownsville. As you might imagine, the drive is less than scenic, so I end up either on the phone or just having alone time to think. That alone time is sometimes spent thinking about work and sometimes spent just thinking about anything that comes to mind.

On this last trip back I started thinking about history and it's relationship to us and our lives. History is so much closer than most of us seem to realize. Some of us are fortunate enough to have grandparents we can ask about the things we can only read about in books. I can watch movies and read books and read about the Kennedy assassination, but I can also ask my grandparents about their thoughts and experiences with it. I don't mind researching things, but the looks and facial expressions and and the tone of voice that can change a story simply from text in a book to an understanding of the place from where we evolved.

It's really is easy to get back to things that seem SO far off in our minds. My grandfathers are both in their 70s. They've experienced so much history in their lives and have a different understanding of things I've only read about in books. But, thinking beyond that, they have heard stories and had shared with them the experiences of THEIR parents, who were probably born in the late 19th, early 20th century. That would mean my grandfather's grandfather was born sometime in the 1860s.

That seems like simple math, but my mind started to put that in historical perspective. I have a great relationship with Paw-Paw and talk to him a lot. He tells me about how things were when he was a kid. If he had those same conversations and relationship with HIS grandfather, we're suddenly talking about a man who was alive during the premier of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. These two generations saw the invention of the automobile and the airplane and then my grandfather spearheaded the development of the space shuttle. Those three generations saw the formation and eventual destruction of the Soviet empire.

There are so many ideas and perspectives that we can find by just talking to people older than us. I want to take more of an opportunity to find out about those kinds of things. Those are the memories and stories that make the world around us and the history which we read about seem that much more tangible. It's also a reminder to pay attention to those things happening around us because we are living the history that our grandchildren and future generations will hopefully be exploring with us someday.