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Comment by Ronsenshi | Hacker News Reader

She must have had so many interesting stories to tell. Such an amazing experiences - born in the early 1920s, being a young adult at the beginning of the Second World War, seeing mass commercialization of air travel, flight to space, miniaturization and age of information. And she even caught beginnings of AI (or pseudo-AI).

She "picked" a good place to live and observe the flow of time and events where she directly wouldn't be affected by various negative events throughout the century of her life.

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I’m generation X. My grandmother will be 97 in March. Her memory is actually really good. She gets frustrated when she’s talking about family and doesn’t recall a specific name of a great- or great-great-grandchild (With five generations alive at the same time, that’s a lot of names. I call my kids and my granddaughter the wrong name all the time - ah the human condition), but her mind is doing well.

Many times, I have mentioned how things have changed in the last century, how most of the things we make use of now were developed and refined in the last 100 years - industrial machinery, communications, computers …

There’s a simpleness to her experience. She is most definitely a beneficiary of society. She has lived comfortably without the need to understand how everything works; and hasn’t had the curiosity to question.

I’m not sure I have a point, but I do personally find it a little disappointing to have someone who lived through so much without having the ability to discuss it at depth.

Some people lived through amazing change. My grandmother was born in the late 1890s in rural Wales, and died at 95. She remembered electricity coming to her village and the visit of the first motor car, the arrival of radio and telephones. She saw men land on the moon and towards the end of her life went to the USA on a 747. Yet when she was a girl she lived with older farm workers who had never been more than ten miles from where they were born.

When my family moved to Somerset from London in the 1970s our elderly next-door neighbour, after hearing we'd moved from London, said "I went to Bristol [25 miles away] once. Didn't like it much." Apart from that he'd stayed in the town we'd moved to. I think about that a lot and sometimes envy his contentment in staying where he was - he had everything he needed.

I grew up watching movies where it was common for the character to be living as adults in the town they were born in, and sometimes even in the very house they were born.

As an immigrant, I thought this was a missed opportunity. In my head this is what it means to be a local.

My wife on the other hand has been migrating for so long that she has no ties to any land. Not of her forefathers which she has never been to. Not of her grandfather which she also has never been to. Nor of her fathers given that he hates the place. still has longing for the land of her childhood but she is not allowed to go back to. And now she is here, too detached to continue to live in the same place as us.

Gregory Aldrete opens his Great Courses lecture series on ancient history by noting that although most of us engage with history through works of art and accounts military conquest, 90 to 95 percent of all people living back then would have been born on a farm, spent their lives tilling soil interrupted by the occasional calamities of flood or disease, and then died likely not having travelled more than a few kilometers away.

My grandfather was born in the 1890s. He watched the first moon landing with us. He had tears in his eyes and said "when I was a boy I carried flint and steel to start a fire".

When I was a boy I had to call the library to get the definition of a word that was not in my family's dictionary. 39 years old now.

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