h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

personal experience, and the remembrances of others, are what give us our impressions of events that we were not around to witness.

My brother-in-law's mother was pregnant with her first child when the "Spanish flu" came along. She lost the child, needless to say. She began turning blue, and developed double pneumonia. the doctor had pretty much written her off, but then she rallied and eventually made a complete recovery. She went on to have eight more children.of which my brother-i-law was the youngest. At least three of her surviving children are in their nineties now, with more arriving at that age probably.

The doctor told her that it would take a truck to kill her. Actually, she was in a car accident in her late eighties, and she ultimately died. My broth-in-law thinks that she had stomach cancer at the time, and wasn't long for the world, but the accident sure didn't hwlp.

Wow, what a story! Thanks for sharing!

Her first name was Iris. She was a bit of a character. A farm wife who soldiered on through lots of kids and widowhood (her husband, a postmn, died of a brain tumor; my brother-ion-law was only eight when his father died).) She was quite a frugal Yankee. left over bread got made into bread pudding. Warren. her oldest surviving son was handy in the garden. I remember how big his pumpkins got. He made lots of money picking apples. He never spent much, and when my brother-in-law needed to borrow money for some purpose, that's where he knew he could get a loan. Warren developed Meuniere;'s disease not long before his death at age 89.

Iris's uncle was Burton Wheeler (1882-1975), a senator from Montana who never stopped going, even after he left office. he kept an office in Washington, and kept in touch with the people he had worked with earlier. One day Iris noticed that someone had just delivered a Volkswagen Beetle to her house. It was a gift form Uncle Burton. I don'tthink he realized that she didn't drive.

Wow. Sound like an interesting cast of characters.

You have no idea! Life in a small town -- just about *any* small town -- is amazing. I admit that I couldn't wait to leave the town I grew up in. I was wrong! The place just got more and more interesting, and I'm pretty much priced out of the housing market there now.

I think I get this strain of obstreporousness from my grandmother. She probably got tired of moving from place to place all across the country -- her father specialized in building dams so that communities could have municipal reservoirs. Obviously, once you've given townspeople a reservoir, they don't need you any more, so you have to be off somewhere else that doesn't have a reservoir yet. The last job ended when he was killed. The new dam had just been finished, and some construction vehicles didn't see hi in time . His widow and my grandmother were left high and dry in the town, so they settled in as best they could. My grandmother was not supposed to marry. She was expected to take care of her mother in her old age. That didn't sit well with my grandmother. She found a husband who was willing to live in the same house as his mother-in-law, and rise his children there. My grandmother was angst-ridden about this, but my father and his brother remember their childhood in idyllioc terms.

Never mind that 1919,l the year when my grandparents married, was also the peak year for the Spanish Flu. I don't think they were oging to let anything stop them.

Wow. That's sad about the reservoir-builder. Sounds like he did a lot of good in his time.

My grandmother remembers living in Virginia, upstate new York, and central Massachusetts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wachusett_Reservoir

Not a bad legacy to leave to future generations.

http://www.mwra.com/04water/html/hist4.htm

My father was taken by his father to Wachusett Reservoir for fishing on Sunday afternoons. It would have been a feather in his cap that his grandfather had been the lead engineer in putting the Wachusett Dam in place.

Very impressive!

To a child (as my father as at the time), it would be more impressive if he caught plenty of fish, and they tasted good when my grandmother cooked them for dinner that night.

I like the existentialists because they let you celebrate the golden moments of your life when things are sunny and happy. Unlike, say, some of the more austere Christian sects that make you feel you're sinning if you're too happy.

Jean-Paul Sartre was an existentialist. I read his memoirs when I was a teenager, and the poor man made me so sad. He didn't seem to be very happy. Camus, either.

Soren Kierkegaard was a Christian existentialist.

I've seen a fair number of people who call themselves Christians who specialise in making other people unhappy, so there's that. I suspect that any and all human constructs of reality end up in the same place: miserable people making other people miserable with all their explaining.

Jesus, on the other hand, told people to take it a day at a time, and be like the birds and the flowers, not worrying about tomorrow.