Lifetimes

This entry started out as a thought I had while riding to work the other day. Actually, my train of thought started out with thoughts of buying a new printer for our computer, to the fact that I hope it lasts until the inks run out of the brand new cartridges I just put in, to my dad's buying ink for his Dell...

And I started thinking about lifetimes. I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder's books when I was a kid. She was born in 1867 and died in 1957. She crossed the country in a covered wagon and lived almost long enough to see Sputnik. It just seems as though my life, our present-day lives, won't encompass such startling change. But then I thought of my dad and I had to laugh. I called him that evening and said, "What do you imagine you would have thought if, when you were a little boy growing up in Berlin, Pennsylvania, in the 1920's, someone had come to you to say 'When you're grown up, you will be having casual conversations by phone with people in India about ordering ink for your computer printer.'?"

So what are some of the really big changes in my lifetime? Well, you're reading one of them on another one of them. To be able to write something that anyone in the world could read, on a personal computer sitting in my house (or, in this case, my office)...well, that's pretty different. Cell phones, certainly. (Though the ability to be reached anytime, anywhere...I'm not sure that's one I love.) There have certainly been advances in medicine and space travel...

But really, it doesn't seem the same as covered wagon to space race, does it?