Preparations have begun for my mother’s birthday, more than likely to be held at a favorite inn near Saluda in October.
I shall probably be scolded for telling you that she will soon turn 90 years of age.
It’s astonishing, really, when I think of what she and, also, my father, who died four months short of his 90th, witnessed within their lifetimes: the advent of flight from fragile biplanes to the Space Shuttle, rickety motorcars to today’s gleaming, aerodynamic machines with in-board navigational systems, party-line telephones to Iphones … the list goes on and on.
Being quite a late-life baby and a surprise at that, I was always keenly aware that my parents were far older than those of my friends.
Add to the mix that they were European and couldn’t understand the crush of not making the high school drill team (“The Drill what?”) or any other element of pop culture, particularly a desire to eat a greasy, fast food hamburger, made a gawky teenager feel somewhat adrift.
However, every now and then, things would come up in conversation that, even at that age, I knew were exclusive to their generation and heritage.
“Oh, yes,” Mom would sigh, helping me with my history homework regarding World War II. “I remember quite well standing on the beach in England with my girlfriends and watching the dog fights in the sky between our boys and the Germans. We’d always cheer when we saw a German plane get shot down, but I also felt secretly bad that he was going to suffer such an awful end.”
Taking a sip of tea she would add, “And I remember walking with my father and looking up in the sky at a biplane and saying to him, ‘It looks as if it’s just hanging still in the air,’ and he would laugh and say, ‘don’t be fooled: that plane’s probably going as fast as 150 miles per hour.’ And I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, imagine going that fast!’”
My father, always one to prefer memories of a cruder nature, enjoyed telling the tale of his first job in Bavaria, delivering beer for his father, a brewmeister, by horse and cart, trundling down hillsides in freezing weather, the only warmth coming from the repeated steams of broken wind emanating from the horse, Fritzi.
It makes sense now as to why he was absolutely enchanted with the moon landing in 1969. Vividly, I remember watching that with the rest of the family in my aunt’s London drawing room while visiting.
The black and white images remain etched into my mind along with my father taking me later outside into the rear walled garden and pointing to the moon saying nearly reverently, “Do you see that? Do you realize that men are walking on that right this moment?”
However, for a child who was experiencing her childhood at the height of these glorious undertakings, I couldn’t understand the significance of what I was seeing.
After all, my world was surrounded with passenger jets, television, ‘hi-fi’ stereos and, best of all, The Beatles. I imagine my less than enthusiastic response of, “Yeah, that’s neat,” must have been somewhat wounding.
But life has a way of bopping one on the head with the irony of those recollections. I’m now only a few years younger than my Dad was in 1969 and to me, wonders never cease, which is why I had a marvelous chuckle at the feed store when a young man, perhaps 23 or so, was loading my truck while we discussed, “the problem with kids today.”
“My little boy takes everything for granted!” he exclaimed, wiping his brow with his cap. “And I had to tell him, ‘you know, son, telephones didn’t always have cameras in them and you couldn’t get the Internet on them, neither. In fact, I remember my first cell phone when I was just a kid…”
The fascination between the generations; some things never change.