Free Form Friday: My Time Thing

Here’s the game: Figure out how many degrees of separation you are from George Washington. My answer is seven. How? I met Ted Kennedy, who, as a child met FDR*, who in turn met Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt’s Secretary of State was John Hay, who as a younger man worked for Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln (briefly) served in Congress with John Quincy Adams who in turn met Washington. So that’s seven degrees of separation. (The asterisk is that I’m pretty sure Joseph Kennedy brought his children, including young Teddy to meet FDR, but if I’m remembering that incorrectly then I have eight degrees of separation). Anyway, isn’t that cool???

This is an example of what my wife calls my “time thing.” The exact definition of “my time thing” is a little fuzzy, even in my own head, but I think it boils down to how we (I?) experience time at much slower pace than its actually moving. I am much closer to George Washington than it seems. Long ago often isn’t really long ago:

– I’m 55 years old. Plenty of people who were alive when I was born had been alive during the American Civil War.
– I had actual conversations with my Great Grandfather about what he remembered about attending the Pan American Exposition as a child in Buffalo in 1901. You know, where William McKinley was assassinated (although my Great Grandfather wasn’t present on that particular day).
– I read comic books in high school. Plenty of characters, including non-superhuman, not-yet-retired characters had been adults during World War II.
– David Bowie wore Zoot suits during his 1983 Serious Moonlight tour, that was 40 years ago (well, 41). Zoot Suits were popular 40 years before that.
– Bowie’s career ended when he died in 2016. Bing Crosby’s began in 1923, so when they did that Christmas duet, that was a meeting point of 93 contiguous years of pop music.
– We’re going to see The Rolling Stones this summer. Someone my age who saw the Stones when they debuted in 1962 would have been born in 1907. Its safe to say that plenty of people born in the 19th Century saw the Stones, and plenty of people who have and will see the Stones will live into the 22nd Century.
– I was once walking down the street with a friend and her baby daughter (let’s say the daughter was 1 year old at the time). We encountered one of her neighbors who was 96. It’s entirely possible that two entire centuries will have passed between the birth of the older woman and the death of the baby (assuming she lives to an old age).
– I could easily get away with wearing a suit from 1924– 100 years ago. A guy in 1924 couldn’t have gotten away with wearing a suit from 100 years before that. And formalwear from 1724 would have looked like a costume in 1824 (and ever since).

I can go on and on— I think you get the point.

Actually, what is the point again?

Well, I don’t know that I actually have a point per se. I just find it interesting that spans of time seem more remote than they really are. I remember, as a child, learning about Martin Luther King as if he were as remote a historical figure as Thomas Jefferson, but this was less than a decade after he died which, nonetheless was before I was born, so it might as well have been ancient history. Today a decade doesn’t seem like an especially long time.

If I wanted to make a more profound point out of my “time thing,” its that everything isn interconnected, the butterfly effect is real and most of all, the ideas that nothing ever changes is just flat-out wrong. I went to college with a typewriter and came out with a computer. I entered the work world before email or the internet were a thing. I went from having a land line, to a flip phone to an iPhone. Etc. etc. etc. And that’s just technology.

But I don’t mean attempt profundity. Mostly I just think the time thing is cool.