Meanwhile, Back At The Ranch
If I make it to 100 – and Vegas odds are long on that one – I hope that I have the physical capacity and the brain power to still be writing. Maybe even this blog. Imagine that? My kids and their kids would have nearly 70 years of blog posts to sift through. To some, it probably sounds nothing but laborious, but as for me, well, I would give just about anything to have access to my parents – and their parents – daily thoughts on paper before I was around. I could spend hours, days and weeks entrenched in such things.
I write this because Slate has recently begun running the diary of a 100 year-old man and although there’s only two postings so far, it’s so interesting to read. Is there an online resource anywhere where I can read journals and diaries? Of course, there’s blogs, but I’m talking about OLD journals and diaries from, say, 1920-1960 which have been transcribed to the web. And I DON’T mean Anne Frank or other popular figures. I can’t quite put my finger on why the daily thoughts of past generations strike such a chord with me. Or why over the past five years I’ve almost exclusively been reading 20th century biographies. Or why I’m so consumed with finding old family photographs to add to my Flickr page. At some point I’ll discover why the fascination exists and when I do, I’ll report here. But for now, I’ll keep enjoying memory lanes of myself and others.
By the way, my yearbook project continues with this beauty – the 1984 version of Jeff. In case you’re forgetting, there’s a site called YearbookYourself.com where you can upload your face into the heads of many different yearbook era pictures. It’s pretty hilarious. Exhibit C:
