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.

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