Let It Go

 As I was driving into work this morning, I happened to think of what it might be like to have my mom and dad in the pickup with me, shadowing me as I did my daily routine of work today.  My parents were born in the 19-teens and were young adults during the Great Depression.  They married at the end of the 1930’s decade and both passed away in the 1980’s.  They lived in small towns pretty much all their lives and raised their family in a small town in Kansas.

They both worked hard all their working lives, and often, I think, were just a hop and skip away from not having enough to feed their growing family…although we never knew that until later on in life when we siblings reminisced about some things that happened from time to time while we were growing up.

They also were trusting.  They left their keys in their vehicles.  They didn’t lock the house up when they went somewhere.  They left garage doors open, things out in the yard, and generally weren’t that cognizant of nefarious things that might happen.  And pretty much nothing DID happen.

I first have to wonder what they would think of the home we live in.  Four bedrooms, three baths, and more room in just the main floor than the entire house where six of us were raised.  The lower level of our house adds another amount of square footage that exceeds the entire house where we lived as kids.  Our home backs up to a park…a park with deep woods, a creek, and paths for people, bicycles, and horses.  This kind of thing would have been unthinkable in their day except for the most financially favored of the day, and would have been grossly extravagant spending in their opinion.

As I drove into town to work, I wondered what they would have thought of round-abouts…you know, those things at intersections which are supposed to result in better traffic flow.  I wondered how Dad would have navigated the traffic had he been driving.  I thought about all the businesses I passed on my way to work and wondered what they would have thought about all of the shops, small businesses, apartment complexes, and big box stores.

I don’t know what they would have thought about the homeless I saw on my way in to work.  As products of the Great Depression, they were people who raised their own food, sewed their own clothes, and built (actually, remodeled and expanded) their own house, I wonder if they could even comprehend the idea of someone not being able to feed, clothe, and house himself.

The Paxton’s Blessing Box on the outside of our building…what would they have thought about our putting food in the box for anyone to take?  How would they react if they sat in on one of my interviews with someone who couldn’t pay their electric or water bill and needed help?  What would they say about the fact that we have security check out church property each night multiple times during the night, and sometimes have to tell a person loitering on the property to leave?  How would they react to our building being locked down even when we are here and inside?  And what would they say knowing the government is interested in how we maintain our fire sprinkler system, our emergency lighting, and our chair lift that is on our basement stairs at the church?

You see that I’ve not mentioned cellular communications, the Internet, or any of that.  I’ve stayed with some of the more, shall we say, basic things in the modern world.  The “gee-whiz” stuff such as flat screen television and world wide instant communication, artificial intelligence, video streaming, 300 channel cable television, self-driving cars, and the like would be as foreign to them as galactic space travel might be to us.

But, my parents aren’t here…they’re not with me today as I go about my daily tasks at the building.  And it’s probably just as well that they aren’t.  They would be hard-pressed to fit in and understand the changes that have taken place.  It was beginning to be like that back in the 1980’s as they went into their final years.  And it would be all the more difficult now to have any kind of understanding of what society is like in the modern day.

And, you know, it will be the same for us.  We too, if suddenly transported into society forty or fifty years down the road, would have a difficult time comprehending, understanding, and getting along.  We might well feel just as lost as my parents might should they suddenly experience today’s society.

Change is constant.  While we’re part of it, it’s easier to cope with it and often embrace it.  When we’ve been away from it for awhile, it’s more difficult to catch up, and sometimes we never get caught up.  And as we age, it often becomes less important to us to try to keep up.  I’m finding myself in a sort of a middle ground with this.  In some ways, I like to keep current, but in other ways, I’m satisfied to just let it go.  I’m guessing it’s much the same with you if you are approaching or are past about 70 years old.  That’s just the way life often is.

Thanks for listening this week.  Blessings.