The other day, I had the thought that my father was born a century ago.

[raccoon]

100 years! (he's deceased now.)

Boy, did that make me feel old...

(BTW I am not yet old enough for Medicare.)

[sarge43]

1. Hear ya

Both my parents were born over a century ago. My grandfather was born shortly after the Civil War.

[MineralMan]

2. It is amazing, isn't it.

I used to talk to my grandmother, who was born in the 1880s, about what things were like when she was a child. I started that when I was about 10 years old, and she'd tell me about when she was the same age. We continued those conversations until hear death in the 1960s. It was fascinating. I got to hear about the first electric lights in her small town, the first time she ever saw an automobile, her first experience with a radio, and much, much more.

Those conversations started a lifelong fascination about the turn from the 19th to the 20th century. I'm still reading non-fiction from that period. So many changes, and within a time period when I could talk to someone who saw so many things happen.

[raccoon]

3. Did you ever ask her about the 1918 flu? nt

[MineralMan]

4. I did. She told me about friends of hers who had died, and

friends who lost their parents. She was always deathly afraid of the flu.

[raccoon]

5. Wish I'd asked now deceased relatives about the flu--and other things.

I wish I'd thoroughly mined their memories of other family members, and conditions when they were young (as your grandmother told you about), when they were still here. Because once they're gone, it's too late.

Unless you know someone who can conduct seances that work.... :silly:

[MineralMan]

6. I don't know what got me started on that with my grandmother.

It sure made her happy, though, to talk about the old days, so it was worth it, just to make her feel nostalgic. We'd sit around and I'd ask her questions, and she'd look wistful and tell me all sorts of things. She grew up in rural Texas, then moved with her husband to a small copper mining town in Arizona, where he worked as an engineer in the mine. She was a pretty darned good story-teller, too, and I talked her into writing some of her stories down. She sent them to the Phoenix newspaper and they published many of them in their Sunday magazine section. Mostly those were Arizona stories, about prospectors she had known and tiny mines in the desert.

Fascinating stuff. It all gave me a solid historical perspective I could use to examine my own times.

[Festivito]

7. Mine would be 112 today. And, I'm still a decade away from SS.

He married a babe of twenty-five, who had caught and survived the 1918 flu when she was six. (BTW, thank you Doctor Wilson.) All passed on now.

I'm still not old, but, my some of my younger friends are.