The year... in Secrets from myself

A hundred years ago my mother was seven months old. My dad was six and a half years old. Ever since we passed their hundred year birthdays, I feel a little different about time. Events a hundred years ago do not seem so remote. There is a WWI helmet hanging in my cellarway. It came with the farm when my dad and his brother bought it from their cousins in 1950. The cousins had brothers who were in WWI. Three of my dad's brothers served overseas in WWII. My brother was in Vietnam twenty some years later. My kids were not interested in the military and their wars were voluntary. War is different when it's voluntary. It's possible to opt out. WWs I and II, Korea and Vietnam to a great extent were not optional. They affected us all.

One day last week I heard on the radio at work that a branch of the Iowa National Guard is being sent to Afghanistan. I also heard that Senator John McCain has said that we are going to be smarter about Afghanistan than we were about Iraq where according to McCain we won the war but lost the peace. These are the wars that have been easier to ignore because they did not affect us all. They have become the country's longest wars because there is no need to end them.

I am not a historian. I am not a student of current events. I sit here in the kitchen and wonder where my life went. And I ask the same question about the lives of others. We have a brief time here on earth. We come as babes and we leave as wrinkled hags. Some of us do anyway. Others die in their primes of life. They do not live to have grandchildren. They do not collect their pensions. They have tombstones in the cemetery that no one visits.

And our dogs lead even shorter lives.

And most don't get tombstones.