"Generations"

 Dear Reader,

 

Your expressions of concern have been appreciated, even when I have not responded. Typing is still difficult, though I can now use (awkwardly) both hands. The attached essay was begun before my fall, thus easier to complete. 

 

I recognize there are software products that allow dictation, but not being one who speaks, let alone writes, in complete sentences, they are less helpful to me. I constantly revise what I have written, even to the extent of moving around sentences and paragraphs, often to the delete file. And I don’t want to confuse Siri. 

 

While my shoulder is improving and its range of motion is better than it was, it will be at least another week or two before my next TOTD is finished. The working title is “Conformity – The Death Knell for Freedom.”

 

Thanks for your patience and understanding. I hope you enjoy this essay.

 

Best regards,

 

Sydney

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essay from Essex

“Generations”

March 26, 2022

 

“Every generation laughs at the old fashions but follows religiously the new.”

                                                                                                                Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

                                                                                                                Walden, 1854

 

If we are lucky, we know five generations: grandparents, parents, ours, our children and grandchildren. Together, those lives cover over 200 years. I knew all my grandparents. My maternal grandfather died at age 68 in 1947. I remember him but not well. The first born of my grandparents, my paternal grandfather, was born in 1873 and died just shy of his 90^th birthday in 1963. The youngest, my maternal grandmother, was born in 1888, but succumbed to cancer in 1961 at age 72. My paternal grandmother, born in 1875, lived the longest. She met two of our three children and lived to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon in July 1969, dying two months later. Some of my ten grandchildren, all born in the first decade of the 21^st Century, may live to see the 22^nd.

 

As children, we heard stories of the past and dreamt of what lay ahead; now, as grandparents, we dwell on what was and pray the future will be good for our children and grandchildren. It is parents who provide stability, as Kahlil Gibran wrote in The Prophet: “You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”  It is in children that opportunity flourishes: “The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible – and achieve it, generation after generation,” wrote Pearl Buck in The Goddess Abides.

 

My paternal grandfather was born 149 years ago, twenty years before the first gasoline-powered car was road tested by the Duryea brothers of Springfield, Massachusetts. The first subway in the U.S. was opened in Boston (where he lived) in 1897, three years after he had graduated from Harvard College. Politically, his life spanned the Presidencies of Ulysses Grant to John F. Kennedy. Militarily, his life witnessed the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Wounded Knee, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and he saw the first Marines sent to South Vietnam. He was nine when Thomas Edison formed the Edison Electric Illuminating Company in New York but was 52 before half the homes in the United States had electricity. He was 30 when Orville and Wilbur Wright flew the Kitty Hawk Flyer in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. He was 78 when the British De Havilland Comet made the first commercial jet flight from London to Johannesburg. During his lifetime, the nation went from horse and carriage to automobiles, from Jim Crow to Civil Rights, from twice daily newspapers to network television news. His wife, my grandmother, was refused a degree from M.I.T. because she was a woman, despite six years of study during the late 1890s and early 1900s. She was forty-five before the 19^th Amendment was ratified, giving her the right to vote. Yet her granddaughters all graduated from college and were eligible to vote on their 21^st birthdays. There is much accomplishment in a person’s life.

 

While my grandparents, early on, lived 19^th Century lives, a period about which we read, our grandchildren will live lives unimaginable to us on their final lap. Generations allow us to personalize history – to read of an era in which our parents and grandparents lived, knowing they were then as alive as we are now: They read newspapers and books, discussed world events, played sports, visited friends, loved their spouses and families and experienced all the emotions we now feel – love, hurt, want, envy, passion, desire, joy, drive, trust and distrust. Each generation has its time to be alive, to laugh and cry, to work and to play, and to rest and recover. We should remember that our grandparents were grandchildren to those born in the early years of the Republic. George Washington, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony and Abraham Lincoln are not just names in history books, but were once living, breathing souls.

 

The view in the rearview mirror is clearer than the fog that envelopes the road ahead. With grandchildren, one wonders, what lies ahead? Will telecommuting become common and cities lose populations? Will knowledge of one’s genetic profile permit personalized medicine? Will self-driving cars obviate the need to learn to drive? Will genetically engineered plants lower food costs? Will a sharing economy replace the concept of private property? Will we be subject to the whims of someone or some agency that determines what we consume? As the amount of knowledge in the world increases, will the forest be lost for the trees?

 

Now in my 80s, I look back to find answers, knowing that human character doesn’t change – that good and evil always exist. I think of personal lessons learned, which lend credence to the observation that wisdom is gained through experience, not instruction: Of being admonished by my maternal grandmother to remember my grandfather who had recently died – for when you do, she said, he will live on in your memory. I think of the hurt inflicted on a young woman, when in the 8^th grade I refused her invitation at a Sadie Hawkins dance, because she was not deemed pretty. Or the unprompted advice from a stranger, when at a gas station in my 1947 Ford, in the mid 1950s: don’t drive so fast along New Hampshire’s back roads! I recall a lesson from my boss Doug Wilmott in the summer of 1960. Growing homesick while working with a prospecting crew in Canada’s Northwest Territories, I told him I wanted to go home. He quietly assured me of the value of persistence in building self-confidence. 

 

Mankind’s situation has improved over generations. A November 30, 1895 diary entry of a then eighty-five-year-old great-great grandfather reads: “It is difficult, even now, for us of the present generation to fully realize that so short a time ago, comparatively speaking, the very spot where we now reside, enjoying all the luxuries of a refined generation, was the home of ignorant savages. How much more surprising and interesting will this fact be to our children and descendants one of these days, if they can have such reliable accounts to refer to as it is here proposed to give them.” (His reference was to a proposed biography of his late wife’s great grandfather, Samuel Welles, who had purchased Indian lands in Natick and West Newton, Massachusetts in 1763.) Knowledge of the past, mixed with inherited values, leads to understanding.

 

I believe the reason we are here is to lead a happy, constructive and purposeful life. Along the way, we can familiarize our descendants with their antecedents, as each of us is a cog in a continuum of generations that bind us to the past even as we are projected into the future. My grandchildren have dreams – the future is theirs, even though they cannot control it. As Gandalf says to Frodo in The Fellowship of the Ring, “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” Above all, I hope they find happiness, with someone to love and to love them back, as they, in turn, become parents and grandparents. I pray their lives will be happy, motivated and peaceful. We should cherish the generations.