History is amazing

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There's something about history that always just draws me in. I love looking at old photos of people who died long ago or maybe not quite as long ago as we thought. We often think 100 years is a long time when in reality it isn't. There are people who live past 100. It's incredible how far technology has come in what really is such a short amount of time. Some things I often think about when trying to put time into perspective is when I think about my grandparents and when they were alive. I should preface this by saying I was a late in life baby and my parents had me in their 40s and I'm currently 38 with parents who are almost 80. My parents were born in 1945 and 1946 and the amount of things that have happened in their time is insane. I hear people teasing old people about their lack of knowledge in technology without realizing that they didn't grow up with this technology the way we did. They started figuring out computers later in life. Smart phones are a whole new ballgame. The younger generations have learned to adapt from things that started at least somewhat similar to the way we grew up, albeit it's true we didn't have anywhere near the technology we have now when I was a kid but I was young enough to catch onto new technology when it came out. My parents struggle with it. I find it absolutely amazing to think about how the computer isn't as new as we think it is. The concept of a computer actually came out in the 1800s but was never finished and then the first official computer was made in 1943 of course it was nothing like it is now, but my point is technology advanced both slowly and quickly. I love hearing my parents talk about their childhood. Hearing the way things used to be and how they remember when they put the highway in. My grandparents all died when I was fairly young so I never really had a chance to ask them about their childhoods beyond what I knew from the way my parents told me. My mom's parents were born in 1908 and 1912. My grandma was literally born the same year the Titanic sunk. She was born a month after the sinking. Both of my mom's parents lived through the great depression and both World Wars. Slavery, something we think was so long ago was actually more recent than most people realize. Slavery ended in 1865, roughly 47 years before my grandma was born. That means that my grandma could have potentially known a slave at some point in her life. We think things happened so long ago but in reality, things aren't always as long ago as we believe. I'm absolutely fascinated by the things that came before me. Lives were so different back before I was alive. I love the idea of trolleys and more public transportation. I remember watching old movies that took place in New York where they had automats which was an interesting concept to me the first time I saw one in a movie. Automats were mostly in bigger cities and they were a form of restaurant where the food was put behind glass and you could pick and choose what you wanted and you would put coins in the slots next to the food you wanted and then the door would open and you would pull out your food and put it on your tray. It was an interesting concept. I thought it was so odd because I had never seen anything like it before and they didn't exist during my childhood, at least not anywhere near me. I believe the last one closed in 1991 which I would have been alive for but I'm unsure if it operated the same way as the ones previously. Another thing that amazes me are party lines. My mom used to complain about party lines. Party lines are when multiple telephone subscribers shared the same line and anyone on that line could pickup the phone and listen into your conversation. It was not uncommon for your news to be all over town back then, especially in small towns like my mom lived in. She had a neighbor that was always being nosey and putting her nose where it shouldn't be. Our family still talks about this woman that I never actually knew in reference to when someone is being nosey. We'll call them a "Mrs. Norton". My grandma used to get all the details on my mom's life from Mrs. Norton and my grandma would then lecture my mom. I love history because it tells a story of everyone and everything that came before and putting time into perspective of the lives of people you actually know/knew is a lot to take in sometimes but it's incredible to think about how much their lives changed and how different their lives were from our own. There was a great or a great great aunt in my family who was a lady of the night (prostitute) who went crazy from what we believe was probably syphilis and was put in what back then was referred to as a lunatic house. It was this big old asylum that people claim is haunted that has since shut down but is owned by a university that opened up part of it as an art museum. When visiting the city my grandma was raised in I wanted to check out the art museum to get a glimpse of what it used to look like. They had mostly remodeled it but I found a part that had the old flooring and I saw some of the original features which made me excited. They also had a room that had pictures of back when it was still an asylum. I was fascinated. They probably thought it was amusing seeing me wander the building and not looking at the art but the building itself. It was only a very small section of the building as it was a very large asylum but it was really neat getting a glimpse of a place that housed a relative that my mom actually got to meet. My mom said she was afraid of the aunt because she was crazy (which I mean she was living in an asylum). My mom was a child and someone had taken her out of there for the weekend and she said her cousin had to share a room with her. I think people would be amazed how short of a span of time it has actually been since certain events happened. I get entranced when learning about parts of history. I love thinking about how they lived before us and I think about the different families living in the different old homes around me. I wonder about what their lives must have been like. You'd be shocked at how many different events happened around the same time. I might talk about that another time but for instance wooly mammoths were around during the time pyramids were being built in Egypt. It's also believed the oldest shark could potentially be around 500 years old (The Greenland shark) meaning that same shark would have been around for a lot of historical events. Just something interesting to think about.