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A bit of making fun of me encountering one of the signs that I’m getting old, prompted by some fun comments about overlapping lifetimes on the post “Memeing the Month Away”:
My mental markers of time are way out of date. A century is no longer the massive era or epoch measure of time it has always been in my mind.
About four years ago we were watching one of those shows in the house renovation genre, though this particular show was about renovating motels. The host introduced one episode announcing that they were going to renovate a “century-old motel.” My thought was, “How can a motel be a century old? Cars weren’t a thing a century ago.”
I was born in 1956, so for most of my life “a century ago” and “last century” meant horses and buggies, no cars, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no telephones.
But I had to realize that in 2021, life “a century ago” (1921) included, for many, if not all, a car and electric lights, indoor plumbing, and maybe experience with telephones. Oh, yeah. My grandfather owned a Ford Model T by 1921, and he and my grandmother were driving it around Maryland to visit relatives. So, yes, the early versions of motels (lodgings designed for the motoring public) were being built by then. Suddenly “a century ago” no longer seemed like the ancient history I had always thought of it as.
In my mind, “a century” or even “a half a century” was a really, really long time, referencing big changes in life and culture, not a time within a person’s memory. Life “a century ago” was nothing like life today, so different it might as well have been on a different planet.
Yet now life “a century ago” looks much more like life today than life “a century ago” looked a few years ago. “A century ago” now includes a bunch of what I’ve always thought of as “modern” history. And my high school days were more than “a half-century” ago. Yikes!
My mental markers of time have gotten way out of date.
Do others have this problem?
Discussion (27)
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Yep. I write history, too.
One grandfather grew up on the family's sailing barque. It hauled freight in the Mediterranean, not tourists. The other grew up in a peasant village in Greece where state-of-the-art farm equipment was a burro. Both lived to see men walk on the Moon. That is a big change.
When I was a kid, all the dads were World War II vets. Now that is 80 years ago. The 707 and DC-8 were cutting edge. We had reached the moon. Today the jets are no faster than the 707 and DC-8. The 747, brand new in the 1960s, is still being used and the Air Force still uses B-52s. We are still trying to get to the Moon. That really seems like not much change. Even with the Internet.
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Oh, yeah. Blazing Saddles is more than half a century old. And I saw it in the theater when it came out.
Also, where are the flying cars? We were promised flying cars.
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The Jetsons had flying cars, but they still had land lines and sent telegrams or wires.
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I don't consider it a problem. This isn't exactly what the OP is about, but when I think of things last encountered in the 1990s or earlier, and not particularly missed in the interim, it pleases me to say, "Man, I haven't seen or done that in this century."
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I've had that thought watching movies from the 1920's on TCM. The characters ride in cars, use the telephone, and have electric lights. I could live there and it wouldn't be too foreign. But go back another hundred to 1820 and everything would be different, even to the people from 1920.
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