I was talking to my brother tonight and somehow age/birthdays came up. He said that he’d been thinking about time and history, pointing out that between the year he was born and now is the same amount of time as between his birth year and Kennedy’s assassination.
An interesting thought. Then, without missing a beat, he said that for me, the time between me being born and now would be the same (roughly) as Sputnik and the year I was born. In other words, when I was born, a person of my current age would have been born in the middle of the Space Race.
And, my brother concluded, for my grandfather, if you reversed his current lifetime from the year of his birth, you’d end up in the Mexican-American War.
First of all, the fact that my brother can whip these facts out of thin air indicates that I am not the only nerd of the family.
Second, this is a trippy way of thinking about time and history! As my brother observed, it makes you realize how very young the U.S. is - as a country we haven’t even been around for 10 generations (if 1 generation = 30 years).