Time is Relevant

Time is so relevant. Years ago, my oldest son was given a pair of sandals by his grandmother. As expected, he outgrew the sandals, but I held onto them for his younger brother to grow into. A few years later, I put the sandals on my younger son. He thoughtfully looked at them, then asked me why there was a “worm” on the side of his sandal? A worm? It took me a few minutes to realize that time had passed us by and the picture of ET on the side of his sandals, to a 3 year old who had never seen the movie or heard any of the “hype”, looked like a worm. When I was in grad school, working on a Master’s in Dietetics, I took a required cooking class. While I had gotten my Bachelor’s about 10 years earlier, a young man in my class was not only going straight through getting his Master’s right after finishing his Bachelor’, he had obviously, never been taught to cook anything and really struggled with the class. As a result, the women in the class, who would invariable finish up what we were fixing quickly, would tend to go over and help the young man so that the food he was supposed to be fixing would be finished before the class ended (after all, we didn’t get to eat until everything was finished). One day, as I was helping him, he tried to make “polite conversation” to fill the void. So he asked me if I liked music, then started telling me about a “GREAT” band he had recently heard. Almost every other comment was that it was a “REALLY OLD” band, but it was “REALLY GREAT” and he was sure I would enjoy the band if I heard them. Even though they were “REALLY OLD”, they were great. When he finally finally got around to telling me the name of the band, it was the “Moody Blues”. Unfortunately, I then crushed him, when I simply said that I had danced to “Knights in White Satin” at my wedding many years earlier. He was silent for the rest of the class. Most of today’s young people have no idea what using a “party line” phone was like, or how to use a payphone and ask an operator for help. They know how to text, but use a manual typewriter? Much less what to do if you made a mistake and had to correct it before IBM came out with a Selective 3 that could type BACKWARDS to cover a mistake (I could type backwards faster than forward when I was in college). Just as our generation often didn’t truly understand the references that framed our parent’s and grandparent’s generations, our children and children’s children won’t understand the references that framed our generation. I was speaking to an older veteran recently and she lamented that many of the younger people she runs into have no idea what WWII was all about. As the WWII generation (of which she is a part) dies off, current generations don’t understand the lessons that were learned and how their history was impacted by the war. They know about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but many don’t even understand how the Vietnam War impacted our country. I pointed out that some of the recent movies are helping that, but she responded that the young people she has talked to see those as entertainment, not as history. While we often tell people to learn from history, rather than to repeat things that didn’t work, we fail to take into consideration that our history is seldom completely known by those around us. Our personal history shapes our views on life; our understanding of not just the world around us, but of the reactions of other people to things that are going on. If we have never experienced famine, how are we to truly understand someone who has? It is with an open heart and a willingness to learn from others that we are able to truly move forward and understand the world around us