If my father were still alive, he'd be about to turn 100 y.o.a. this September. Long lives are not a long suit of my family, owing to the risky undertakings of some departed distant relatives such as "Wrong Way" Clark, who kept driving his Studebaker the wrong way into tunnels and over bridges, "Shocky" Clark, who demonstrated that inserting the tines of a fork into an electric outlet was bad for the fork (and its holder), and "Sinker" Clark, who was the first to prove that you really shouldn't go in swimming for half an hour after eating.
But Dad wasn't from that side of the family. A prudent, cautious gentleman, he lived to be 84, and to zoom past the three-score-and-ten mark, outlined in the Bible, by 14 years is a pretty good life.
I stumbled across this link on Stumble Upon. I find it interesting and I hope you do. Dad surely would. If I could talk to him about the world he was born into and the world of a little fellow born today, he would be fascinated. Just the other day, Peggy and I discussed whether Dad would have a smart phone, and I don't know that he would have. He might have gone with a plain cell phone. It would not have been his way to be driving to Home Depot while texting someone about meeting him later that morning and seeing how many board feet of lumber he would need to repair the back steps. He would be appalled to see the way most people today drive and act and write.
We talked earlier this year about a little baby born to a splendid couple of Baltimore journalists. His mom pointed out that he could very well live to see the year 2100 rung in. I was thinking that my Dad's family, at his birth in 1913, would scarcely have dared to wonder if he would still be around in 2000.He didn't miss by much, but he did live long enough to see Sonny Bono get elected to the US Congress. And maybe that was more than his family could have ever dreamed.
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