Tuesday, September 3, 2013

100 years

A century. It sounds like a long time, but some people live to be a hundred... so maybe it's not so long after all. People were not so different 100 years ago as they are now. They had come through the Industrial Revolution and had become accustomed to technology in their lives. They lighted their homes with electricity. They drove automobiles. They used telephones and typewriters and made clothes on sewing machines. They mail ordered all sorts of things from a catalog -- clothes, shoes, household tools, etc. They recorded their everyday activities in snapshots with Kodak cameras.

Sometimes I think about Jack and Blanca, and what they were doing exactly 100 years ago. She was a young bride with an 8 month old baby boy. Her husband struggled to transition from his college football glory days into the bigger game of international finance. Did he lose interest in his glamorous trophy wife after she became a mother? Not many details are known of this time in their married life, except when Blanca complained later of feeling neglected and lonely. She was only 19 and her family in Chile was half a world away.