Trouble with Time

Time trouble comes from not fully understanding how our perception can be distorted. For instance:

• Marilyn Monroe and Queen Elizabeth of England were born in 1926, and yet we think of one as an old woman and the other, a sex symbol.
• Anne Frank and Rev. Martin Luther King were each born in 1929, making them younger than the Queen of England.
• Thomas Jefferson died when Harriet Tubman was four years old, and Ronald Reagan was two years old when she passed away.
• “The Lion King,” “Forrest Gump,” and “Jurassic Park,” movies all released in October 1994, are now closer in time to the Apollo Moon Landing of July 1969 than they are to February 8, 2021.
• Charlie Chaplin, a star of the silent film era, lived long enough to see the original “Star Wars,” considered to be a computer graphic imagery masterpiece.
• And even if he were still alive, born in 1935, Elvis Presley is younger than William Shatner, who was born in 1931.

When I was a kid, I couldn’t help wonder what my parents did with their time since neither had a television growing up. But then at one point in my life, I didn’t have the Internet or a smartphone, and now I find myself wondering what I did with my time.

Finally, my son, at 28, has never known a world without television or the Internet. I wonder if he ever thinks what it must have been like for Dad to have grown up in the “good old days.”