77th Anniversary of Pearl Harbor different than previous anniversaries

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

11. Oh, dear lord!

I hope you informed that young person.

I'm old enough at 70 to remember how ignorant we were when young. Our elders had lived through the Great Depression and WWII, and many of us simply didn't know very much about those things, depending in large part how much our parents told us.

My parents were born in 1913 and 1916, which means they lived through both. But from what little I got from them, the Depression didn't impact them very much, perhaps because their families were relatively poor to begin with. As to WWII, my father was in the service, but he did not see combat. Because he had a college degree in accounting he was stationed somewhere, I think in Indianapolis, where he saw to it that other soldiers got their paychecks. I never thought to ask him about his experiences, and he died in 1973, long before I understood he could tell me stuff.

All of us have stories to tell. And all of those stories are very interesting. It's up to us to pass those stories on.

It's so easy to think, "Oh, well, my life isn't very interesting," and that's not really true. Even the most boring and mundane of lives is fascinating, and the way things change, things that happened only a few decades ago (Watergate!) are unknown and hopefully interesting to young people.