The passage of decades is a funny thing. When one considers adult life as a teenager the imagination tends to stall around age 50 at the most. From that vantage point adult life is the quarter century between 25 and 50, a seemingly endless stretch within which all the important things happen. Becoming fully adult, selection of mate, perhaps children, profession and adventure. Life beyond middle age is merely a slide into the grave. Old people are Other. One just cannot imagine turning into one.
When we are twenty and consider a time thirty years in the past it appears as History, a different epoch peopled by quaint folks wearing funny clothes doing old fashioned things like using dial phones and writing letters. Again, subtly Other.
Children are time made flesh. Without growing children in our daily life it is easy to lose track of the passage of years, nay, decades. A movie may be on my radar as something recent that I intend to see one of these days and by the time I get serious the remake is a classic.
The thirties, the decade in which my parents came of age and met each other, has never been anything but history, a time completely sealed off from the present. WWII made that even more so of course. Everything was Before and After. Yet in the fifties, my formative decade, the thirties were only twenty years ago. Here it is almost 2016, and surely the nineties were only yesterday?
The Spanish Civil war was as far removed in time from our tipi years as the tipi years are from the present. It doesn't feel that way. I find it fascinating to see the times of my own life turn into the stuff of imagined history.
It is winter, no garden. My future may hold a stint of caregiving but it is not happening yet. Time to start writing some memories down, just for the H of it.
When we are twenty and consider a time thirty years in the past it appears as History, a different epoch peopled by quaint folks wearing funny clothes doing old fashioned things like using dial phones and writing letters. Again, subtly Other.
Children are time made flesh. Without growing children in our daily life it is easy to lose track of the passage of years, nay, decades. A movie may be on my radar as something recent that I intend to see one of these days and by the time I get serious the remake is a classic.
The thirties, the decade in which my parents came of age and met each other, has never been anything but history, a time completely sealed off from the present. WWII made that even more so of course. Everything was Before and After. Yet in the fifties, my formative decade, the thirties were only twenty years ago. Here it is almost 2016, and surely the nineties were only yesterday?
The Spanish Civil war was as far removed in time from our tipi years as the tipi years are from the present. It doesn't feel that way. I find it fascinating to see the times of my own life turn into the stuff of imagined history.
It is winter, no garden. My future may hold a stint of caregiving but it is not happening yet. Time to start writing some memories down, just for the H of it.
My perspective on the decades as well. But then we are contemporaries...:)
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