Mom's birthday was so long ago... and yet

Today would have been my mother's 96th... though she died at age 70 after a brief battle with cancer. Far too young. She's been gone for 26 years, which is too much for me to fully process since many of my memories of her are timeless.

But beyond a sense of vague sadness and loss, today got me thinking about how close to us the past really is. Let's look at what was going on in 1927, less than a century ago.

• The 1927 baseball season was the year Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs.
• Charles Lindbergh flew The Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic nonstop and solo, direct from New York City to Paris, as the first solo transatlantic flight.
• Work began in October on Mount Rushmore (finished in 1941).
• In a unanimous opinion the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Nixon v. Herndon case during March, declaring a Texas law that prohibited black voters from participating in the state’s primary elections to be unconstitutional. Texas immediately passed a state law that retained this blatant discrimination.
• Joseph Stalin took control of the Russian Communist party (Trotsky was expelled, as well).
• Six striking miners from the Columbine Mine are massacred with machine gun fire at Serene, Colorado. Many more were injured.
• In Britain, 1000 people a week died from an influenza epidemic during the fall and winter of the year.

Baseball lost its place as the National Pastime, supplanted by the much more violent football. Lindbergh became a famous white supremacist, if not a Nazi. Mount Rushmore remains a top tourist destination, though Crazy Horse Mountain has arisen as an ongoing project that sends a different message. The degenerated Republican Party seems set on restricting voting rights for as many Americans as possible. Putin is the newest version of Stalin, and seems to hunger for long-gone days of Soviet power. Unions continue to struggle, though management refrains from using guns on workers. Epidemics continue and pandemics keep challenging humanity.

In some ways, so much has changed in 96 years. In others, we see that the past isn't really the past, after all. 

Barbara Fern Guffey was born just before the Depression in Freeport, Illinois, site of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Her mother and father clearly had hope for the future, bringing a daughter into troubled times... but maybe we are always in "troubled times." Her father had been a sailor in WWI, which ended just nine years before her birth. 

She lived through the Depression and then WWII, set aside her personal dreams to get married, move to Iowa City and have a family, beginning with me in 1950, and then bore seven more children. They are scattered up and down the west coast, along with me in Colorado and brother Mike, the only one remaining in Iowa.

Someday I hope to write something more meaningful (and personal) about my mother and father, though I must admit to spotty memories of many of the specific moments we shared. Mom never met her great-grandchildren, of course, which is sad because she loved and treasured babies so much.

And now her eldest great-grandchild is about to go away to college, in the very town Barb's husband whisked her away to over 73 years ago. Grace is not like Barb in any clear way, yet she owes something to what her great-grandmother taught and modeled and endured and enjoyed.

I suspect that my mother might have achieved a lot had she been able to pursue her professional dreams (teaching? music? business? medicine?). But she became a mother among millions of mothers who produced the Baby Boomers. Being a housewife had to be enough, and none of her children regret her care and attention and love.

I also suspect that Barbara would embrace and celebrate the independent, sassy, and passionate young Grace as she begins a new adventure, back in the town where she spent nearly 50 years. 

As William Faulkner said, “The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past.”

And that is why remembering my mother's birthday today led me to think more about the future.