Skip to main content

Getting Things into Perspective

December 3, 1905.

My father was born on December 3rd, 105 years ago.

One hundred and five!

That is such an odd thought!  It ought to be so normal,
but it seems too long ago to be a real number.  It ought not to be.
As a child, I knew my great-grandparents, and they were born
in 1852, and in 1857.  So Anna Rønning was born 158 years ago.
I am not sure I have personally known anyone born earlier.

There are articles in our newspapers, right now, that suggest
that there may be three times as many stars as we had thought,
and that the universe, already thought to be 13 or 14 billion years old,
may be older than we had thought, too.  I am cool with that.
I can recall, not too many years ago, when common wisdom
was that the universe was 17 billion years old.  Easy come, easy go!

Big deal, huh?  The universe is only about 100 million times as old
as the time since Anna Rønning was born, before Lincoln was
elected as President.  I cannot quite comprehend 105, or 158.

This is what I can comprehend:  in two days, I will be 79:
a prime number, however you look at it!  Gail and Marty,
my grandchildren, Spencer and Sophie, and Mari are having
a surprise birthday party for me.  I will fix the dinner.
Mari will prepare breakfast.  I can understand seventy-nine.
I feel seventy-nine.  It is something in my bones.  Arthritis, probably.

I can measure things against a human lifetime.
Walking three miles an hour means something to me.
Millions and billions are something like gigabytes.
I have to pretend to understand those things.
Nanoseconds, and billions, are games I play in my head.
They are not real, like Sophie and Spencer, or arthritis.

It is nice, gradually, to get things into perspective.
 .

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy.  Those were skills to be learned and practiced.   I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop.  He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes.  He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade.  Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore.  The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up.   I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth.  I knew how to do that.  Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down.  On the second try, aimi
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w
Post a Comment
Read more