57 Going on 95

Mother was 39, and father was 38 when I was born in 1951. I never knew my maternal grandparents; they had passed on by the time my memory started. Grandmother Carney died in the flu epidemic of 1918 and my grandfather Carney died just before I was born. My paternal grandparents, however, lived long enough to be part of my growing up; knowing them influenced my point of view.

When I was in elementary school we went back to Dad’s “home turf” almost every summer. By the time I came along, the grandparents had sold the farm and moved into a house on the edge of a small Nebraska country village. There was no rush to modernize. They still lived in the “old way” as late as 1960 and did not move into a house with indoor plumbing until about 1962. That first house of my grandparents in the village and Dad’s own shared memories of growing up on the farm and of the people he knew has served to expand my own world view.

A summer visit to my grandparent’s house in Nebraska was like a step back in time. I can still remember the creak-clank, creak-clank of the windmill pumping water; drinking water out of a bucket with a tin ladle; bathing in a washtub; catching a chicken to be killed, gutted, and plucked for dinner; potatoes and green beans straight from the garden; using a slop bucket at night for #1, and that outhouse for #2 no matter what the time. Outhouses aren’t very close to their main houses, either, because the wells are close to the houses and you may agree that the two ought to be separated by some distance. That, and the odor...

A year or two after grandfather died we moved back to take care of grandma. There was not enough room for all of us in my grandmother’s house, so we had to find some place to rent. There was only one house available in the village. The only indoor plumbing it had was a cold water spigot on the enclosed back porch adjacent to the kitchen. So I spent the summer and first 5 months of my freshman year in high school living in a place where you had to go to the outhouse in the middle of the winter to do your business.

This different way of life, my father’s stories, having read a couple of thousand books over my life, 6 years in the US Navy with 3 separate overseas deployments, and a job history with over 20 different employers has left me with a wealth of memories and experience. But sometimes, when I pause and reflect, I feel older than my years. It seems to me sometimes that I could not have the memories I have, nor experienced all I have experienced in only 57 years. That’s why I say, “I feel like I am 57, going on 95.”

Of course, much is left unsaid. This is a blog, not a book. I can’t post a life time of hope, love, hate, fear, anger, grief and joy all at once. I have always lived my life with a certain amount of passion and introspection. When I read, I enter the story with such visualization that I feel as if I am part of it. I see connections and cause and effect relationship that many others fail to see – not because they can’t, but because they simply don’t care. This is alright by me… these differences. Thank God for our differences. If we were all the same we would not be a society. We would be some kind of a sick imitation of life; some kind of a mindless machine.