I Imagine She Smelled The Same The Day After As The Day Before

1901. The year Victoria died. The year my house was built. It’s a Victorian, natch. I think it’s fascinating that you can watch a video of her funeral.

You know, there really isn’t all that much history, if you’re talking only of civilization. Twelve thousand years ago, there was a wall of ice thick enough to cover the highest mountain in Maine sitting where I am now.  There’s still a wall of ice outside my door, but it’s on the porch roof and we don’t trouble one another.

My father was a WW II veteran, and his father was a WW I veteran, and the last veterans of the Civil War were wandering around, albeit rather slowly, less than a decade before I was born. Four years after Victoria shuffled off, you could have gone to Hiram Cronk’s funeral in New York. He was a veteran of the War of 1812.

George Washington had barely reached room temperature when Hiram was born in 1800. About a hundred years before ol’ borrowed-teeth George, Galileo was annoying everyone with his heliocentrism and halitosis. It’s easy, and interesting, to hopscotch backwards through the calendars like that until you find yourself up against the wall of ice.

Get busy being interesting — just plain old might do — and maybe someone will have claimed to have known you and Kevin Bacon in a blogpost in a century or so.