When I Was Your Age….

“Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.”  ~Arthur Schopenhauer

This past fall, I spent a day with my grandfather at the casino.  Unlike all our other trips… this time… instead of taking him to his home afterwards…  I took him back to “the” home.  And this meant dinner with Aldo.  On more than one occassion my brother has asked me in puzzlement, “Haven’t you ever heard any of grandpa’s stories?”  And the answer is always no.  Maybe no means not compared to him.  Or maybe no simply means not enough.  Either way, over dinner I was privy to ’back-in-my-day’ stories like I had never been before.  

With me heading back south in a few days… they spoke about when they visited the south for the first time… for training… and how some of their platoon members had to stay behind at home since segregation was still very real down there.  The said it blew their mind when they learned they couldn’t come.  And how the signs they then saw… and the scenes they then witnessed…. were unlike anything they ever imagined.  At one point, my grandpa closed his eyes and shook his head, “Stace.  You wouldn’t believe how unreal it was.” 

A few weeks later…. my second week in town… I stumbled upon some metal signs at the flea market.  Removed from buildings and being sold for a few bucks…. and proof positive of how very real the un-realness was.

Every so often, I think about the sort of un-real things I will get to tell my grandchild about.  My first diatribe in that vain was on traffic, “When I was your age, we had this thing called traffic…. cars would be lined up for miles on end… and just sit there…. completely still…  for hours at a time.”     

I bring this up because I am reading  Raymond Kurzweil’s, The Singularity is Near.  Peter’s recommendation.    Like nothing else I’ve read in an incredibly long time, it is blowing my mind.  Ideas about what the future may look like…  ideas founded on where science is at the present… have made me pace around my apartment and shake my head, “What if?!  What if?! What if!?” 

I liked the stuff on aging.  Maybe someday I’ll get to tell them, “When I was your age, we used to have old people,” and then talk about my grandpa.  And the stuff on foglets was a bit of a mindtrip, ”What I was your age, people used to pay to put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because there was too much.  Now they get paid to do it because there is too little!”

The future is a place that I am excited to see.  This book is reminding me why and making me that much more gung-ho!