There is a lot happening in this post! 😄

First, thank you for the SBI and happy 45 and a weekish birthday!

Second, Ken Burns documentaries are the best.

You talk about the passing of time, the shortness of “modern” history. How close we actually are to things that seem like a distant past. I think about these things a lot. My grandfathers also fought in WWII. One of their fathers (my great grandfather) fought in WWI and his father (my great great grandfather) was a soldier for the Union Army during the Civil War. His brother (who was also my great great grandfather… #cousinmarriage) was a soldier for the Confederate Army and his in-laws (my great great great grandparents owned a plantation and slaves!

160 years is not a long time, but so much information and experience gets lost to history. One because people don’t care to pay attention to what is shared at school. So we have huge swaths of people completely uneducated. But also people don’t pay attention or learn or maybe share their own family’s stories.

I recently stayed with my dad’s cousin. She is 83 years old. Her generation, my dad’s generation won’t be around too much longer. In my 4 day visit the cousin told me SO MANY crazy things about our family. Things I never knew.

For example her father was a naval commander on a submarine. Their family was stationed in Shanghai (I think) as WWII began and the Japanese invaded. My great aunt (with her first born child) had to go into hiding when the Japanese occupied the city and was smuggled out during an escape mission organized by the US Navy. During the war my great uncle commanded the Char (a submarine) that sank a Japanese vessel called the Isuzu. The entire mission was classified for decades. After the war the family ended up in Norway and he was the US representative to NATO and was apparently close to John McCain’s dad.

🤯

These are people I knew. People who were still alive when I was a teenager. My grandpa (brother to the aunty who escaped from Shanghai) was still alive in 2006. And here I was hearing these stories in 2023!

And all I could think was, all of this would be lost if she never told me. Plus, how many other things happened over the course of their lives did we never hear about? I am just living my life, working in a cube. Surfing the internet. While my family was owning slaves or escaping a war zone. It is crazy.

Anyway, this is A LOT of babbling on your post. 😂🤣 But I am turning 49 tomorrow so share your thoughts on where we have been and the speed of the advancements ahead. 🙂