As one gets older, it seems that time speeds by at a greater rate. Not an original thought, I know, but a thought that strikes home more and more every day, especially when good friends pass on.
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On that subject, I found myself re-reading one of my Trib contributions from more than five years ago. At that time, it invoked lots of comments (all good, I have to say).
Time Passing
From the Yass Tribune, 21/09/2011
A fortnight ago, the last surviving relative of the generation before mine passed away. Apart from gulping at the thought that this now made ours the senior generation and gritting my teeth lest my children reach the same conclusion, thereafter thinking of me as old, I was struck by the character of people of my late aunt’s time.
They lived with the memory of the damage wrought by the Great War on their families and their country’s psyche. They grew up through the Depression, saw service in WWII, lived through rationing and hardship and still raised families, built houses and farms and saw their children through an education the majority of them had never experienced.
They drove horse and sulky and flew in jumbo jets walked behind a Clydesdale and plough and levelled land with laser guided tractors. They welcomed wireless and saw it give way to home theatres. The black Bakelite house phone, which they had saved for in the 1950s and ‘60s, gave way to mobile phones, their Brownie boxes to digital cameras and their string and prop clotheslines to rotary lines and tumble driers.
They saw the advent of the computer age, watched a man walk on the moon and saw the history of world climate written in cores of Antarctic ice. They saw the introduction of antibiotics, the eradication of smallpox and transplant surgery. They saw the scourge of polio disappear with vaccination and the terrible legacy of rubella wiped out. They saw infant and maternal mortality plummet.
They witnessed the death of the British Empire and the rise of the US star in the Australasian firmament. They saw former colonies regain independence and their voices heard with authority in the chambers of world discourse. They saw the Iron Curtain fall over eastern and central Europe for half a century and saw it torn away. They saw a fractured poverty stricken China become a powerhouse of the global economy.
They genuinely lived in “interesting times”.
