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Happy Birthday, Mom! *Urp*
Nov. 20th, 2009 04:28 pmToday was my mother's 93rd birthday. She grew up in Salt Lake, spent most of her life in New York and other parts of the world, and returned to Salt Lake in retirement. The world she knew as a child has changed drastically.
Today mother lives in the twilight world of short-term memory loss, constantly in awe of the changed world she sees around her, finding it difficult to fathom the PDA/Cell Phone we used to call her 95-year-old sister during lunch, the GPS in my car, or anything much more complicated than a Smith-Corona portable electric typewriter.
She wanted to write her memoirs - but time caught up with her, and now, if anything is to be completed, it will most likely fall to me to put together the fragments of her extremely rich and varied life; sadly, she no longer has the patience or coherence to record an oral history, although today I learned that she had once been a girl scout at Salt Lake's First Presbyterian Church...
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven - only the good Lord knows how much time any of us will have in the school of mortality. To reach her current milestone, I'd have to live another lifetime, in essence - if I were so fortunate. Technology and science march on so fast I cannot even imagine - despite my fertile imagination - what wonders and miracles my grandbabies will see when they have families of their own.
Whatever the case, Mom has had an amazingly vivid and varied career, and I was honored to brighten her day a bit with a pleasant outing, even if she won't remember a bit of it tomorrow.
Birthday flowers from my brother and a cousin
A decadent Liver & Onion platter with bacon...
- World War I and the Mexican Revolution were in full swing.
- Ireland was on its way to independence after the Easter Rising.
- The Wolf Cubs were founded by Robert Baden-Powell.
- Woodrow Wilson was re-elected President of the United States, and was working to avert a railroad strike.
- The Model T Ford had been in production for 8 years. You could get it in any color, as long as it was black.
- Computers had not even been dreamed of. It would be 20 years before Turing formalized his concept of the algorithm.
- Candlestick phones were common - the first dial telephone would not be installed for 3 years.
Today mother lives in the twilight world of short-term memory loss, constantly in awe of the changed world she sees around her, finding it difficult to fathom the PDA/Cell Phone we used to call her 95-year-old sister during lunch, the GPS in my car, or anything much more complicated than a Smith-Corona portable electric typewriter.
She wanted to write her memoirs - but time caught up with her, and now, if anything is to be completed, it will most likely fall to me to put together the fragments of her extremely rich and varied life; sadly, she no longer has the patience or coherence to record an oral history, although today I learned that she had once been a girl scout at Salt Lake's First Presbyterian Church...
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven - only the good Lord knows how much time any of us will have in the school of mortality. To reach her current milestone, I'd have to live another lifetime, in essence - if I were so fortunate. Technology and science march on so fast I cannot even imagine - despite my fertile imagination - what wonders and miracles my grandbabies will see when they have families of their own.
Whatever the case, Mom has had an amazingly vivid and varied career, and I was honored to brighten her day a bit with a pleasant outing, even if she won't remember a bit of it tomorrow.
Birthday flowers from my brother and a cousin
A decadent Liver & Onion platter with bacon...
