Past and Future

I spent several hours with my two grandsons yesterday. Contemplating what their futures will hold got me to thinking about the past and the family foundations on which their lives will be built. The connection between the past and the future has always intrigued me, and I don’t think anything is more fascinating than the changes in technology that become basic to our lives, yet essential, core values don’t seem to change.

I was lucky to know not only all of my grandparents but also three of my great-grandparents. My family memories, therefore, include the turning of the nineteenth to twentieth centuries and the twentieth to twenty-first. In the very early 1980s, before the advent of personal computers, my maternal grandfather, Sherm, and I sat one afternoon with my oldest son (he was about four) and discussed the changes Grandad had seen in his lifetime.

During his life, he had been a farmer—plowing and planting behind a team of mules. He was my mother’s first “school bus” driver: a horse and wagon or sleigh. Then he bought a car . . . and eventually paid a quarter for a driver’s license. He survived the influenza epidemic, and that kept him from service overseas during WWI when his fever caused him to pass out during formation as his unit was boarding ship.

One of my uncles—Mom’s brother-in-law—was a bomber pilot in WWII and after. He was in Paul Tibbetts’ squadron. My paternal grandfather helped build those bombers in the plant here in Omaha and saw the Enola Gay leave the line.

Grandad Sherm and I talked that day, while my son listened, about cars and jets and landing on the moon and the space shuttle and telephones and computers and television. A year or so later I sent my first email over ARPA-NET and bought my first Mac. And lost my grandfather.

I wonder what my grandsons will see. With all of the changes of the last one hundred years, and the speed of those changes, what is coming could be even more incredible. My oldest grandson even now, at four, knows that his favorite cartoons and movies are available to him any time. He can talk to Grandma from anywhere on Daddy’s cell phone.

One of my former students is a junior “rocket scientist” at USC. His ambition includes the possibility of helping to build and live in the first habitations on Mars. I hope my boys get to see him launch and hear his reports from the red planet.

Lots of changes. What has remained the same? In my family, it’s family. Since my great-great-great grandfather founded a small town in northwest Missouri, we haven’t spread out too much, at least my branch of the tribe. We value the connections, the combined wisdom of the family. We talk to one another frequently; visit as often as we can.

Our physical proximity is unusual in families today, and phone calls don’t really take the place of face-to-face conversations, but communication technologies today have added to our abilities to stay in touch. I doubt very much that the family will continue to stay within 100 miles of one another, but we can talk often, even see one another in real time. It will more than likely get even easier in the years to come. We need to trade stories and continue to benefit from other’s experiences, both good and bad. My grandsons need to hear about the mistakes I’ve made and how I worked my way out of them. I hope I can tell them about more successes than failures, but both provide good lessons. I hope they learn from both sides of the family and carry on some of our traditions of togetherness and appreciate some of the family treasures we’ve saved for them. It will be even better if we can share these memories along with some hugs.

I still think the transporter should be a national priority. “Beam me up, Scotty.”