I’m working with my 91-year-old father these days. We’re making slide shows for three history talks he hopes to give this fall.
From his computer, he sends an image to mine. And with a few clicks, the image is where it belongs—in slide number 21.
We’d been doing this for weeks. But on this day, my dad falls silent for a moment. His eyes travel from my computer to his. And back again.
“I’m amazed,” he says. “What path did that photo take between our computers? Where all did it go?”
My dad learned this kind of talk from his dad.
Grandpa used to lean back in his chair after a good dinner of chicken and mashed potatoes. He’d cross his arms and prop his chin in his hand. And he’d marvel as he recalled the first cars on the public road or the first airplanes that crossed their mountains or the first electric lights that dotted the country side.
He had grown up, after all, with horses and buggies and butter churns. He had seen wool shorn from sheep and then and carded and spun and knit into clothing. No wonder he was astonished at the first space travel and the moon landing.
It’s hard, he’d say, for each generation to imagine what the next one will invent. And he’d tell what he read in the World Book Encyclopedia—that in the early 1800s, an employee at the patent office resigned because there would be no more inventions to patent.
If my grandpa could have seen my dad and me working on the slide show—collecting images of log houses and census records and newspaper clippings and church-vote tallies and putting all this together to be shown on a big screen at a history meeting—he would have been amazed once again.
And I’m like my grandpa and my dad, I can’t imagine what my grandchildren’s generation will create. As far as I can tell, there’s only one invention left—a sort of transport that can bring grandchildren across the miles, from their front doors to mine, in seconds, not hours.
Apple to Apple 