It’s always the 100th anniversary of something or other

On the 28th of this month, people across the world will celebrate–if that’s the word for it–the centennial of the start of the Great War. The First World War.

We commemorate it.  We acknowledge the anniversary and mark it as a significant event.

This was a defining event in the lives of untold millions worldwide.  That war gave us the one which followed it a generation later.

We owe a lot to the First World War.  Tongue firmly planted in cheek.

That date was June 28, 1914.  The United States came to that party late, joining the Allies for the final two years, 1917-18.

A hundred years ago seems like forever to most people today. It wasn’t.

Not by a long shot.

A little background.

As a college student in Birmingham from 1959 to 1962, I worked weekends for the Pullman Company which operated the sleeper cars on the railroads.  At the grand old railroad terminal, later demolished, I filled in for the regular clerk-typist Frank Troncale. This was a great job for a college kid and I often found time to study during the quiet hours.  In addition to helping the agent, C. F. DeNinno if he came into the office, I had to keep up with the locations of the various Pullman cars throughout the state, and assign porters and conductors to Pullman cars added to trains because of high demand.  People were in and out the office all the time.

When they got off trains, porters and conductors would bring in newspapers from distant cities. That’s how in 1961 I began reading the Atlanta Journal/Constitution’s reprinting of a front page from 100 years ago, as the Civil War got underway.  It was a great way to read ancient history.

Well, it felt ancient at the time. These days, a hundred years has shrunk in my estimation. June 28, 1914, was not so long ago.

When my maternal grandfather was born, the Civil War had been over 15 years.  When I was born in 1940, thousands of Civil War veterans still lived, and vets of the Great War were barely entering middle age.

In a manner of speaking my life spans two full centuries.  Consider this….

All four of my grandparents were born in the late 19th century (Kilgore grandparents in the 1880s; McKeever grandparents in the 1890s), and it is not unreasonable to think my own grandchildren will live into the 2080s.  Leah, the eldest of our eight, arrived in 1989 and Jack, the youngest, in 2002.  And here is Grandpa Joe, right in the middle, holding hands with my grandparents on one side and my grandchildren on the other.

Spanning two full centuries.

I have written recently on these pages about America’s Bi-centennial in 1976 and how we took the children on a historical tour to Washington, D.C. and New England and saw a number of presidents’ homes.  I was 36 years old. Two hundred years might as well have been a thousand at the time.

Funny how life moves on and the number of years adds up, and your perspective changes.

No young adult wrote these words from Scripture….

“My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and come to an end without hope” (Job 7:6).  “Now my days are swifter than a runner; they flee away, they see no good” (Job 9:25).

“Behold, thou hast made my days as handbreadths, and my lifetime as nothing in thy sight, surely every man at his best is a mere breath” (Psalm 39:5).

“You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away” (James 4:14).

And from one of my favorite Psalms: “As for man, his days are as grass; As the flower of the field, so he flourishes. When the wind passes over it, it is no more, and its place acknowledges it no longer.” (Psalm 103:15-16)

Anyone see a trend here?  The brevity of life, perhaps?

All of which inspires us to pray the words of Psalm 90:12. “So teach us to number our days, that we may present to Thee a heart of wisdom.”

So, let us commemorate and observe these anniversaries, to honor our dead and learn from their experiences. But mark this down, my friend. Barring the return of the Lord Jesus Christ and the end of time as we know it, in a few short days those around you will announcing a celebration upon the centennial of the arrival of the Beatles on these shores, the assassination of President Kennedy, and your high school graduation.

As the wonderful comic strip character Snuffy Smith used to say, “Time’s a-wastin’!”

So, whatever we intend to do with the time we have left, suppose you and I get on with it.

In the words of the soap opera, “Like sands through the hour glass, so are the days of our lives.”

 

 

2 thoughts on “It’s always the 100th anniversary of something or other

  1. You remain delightful to me. How I love to read your entries from time to time!
    I still quote one of your uncles: “People are funnier than anybody.” But I marvel at your depth and scope of life. Thank you, God, for making Joe McKeever.

  2. In the late 1950s, I was at my great-grandmother’s birthday celebration. She was in her late 90s at the time (Died at almost 102 years of age in 1958 or 59). She gathered together some cousins of mine who were a bit older than me and told them about seeing smoke ‘over that mountain right there’ when she was a little girl…they thought it was a forest fire, but it was smoke from Sherman burning Atlanta, 100 miles away. So I was an ‘earwitness’ to an eyewitness of that event. I’m now 62. If I should live anything like the span she did, I might tell this story to my great-grandchildren, who might be born in the 2030s or 2040s. They would be ‘two degrees of separation’ from that event that would be over 175 years in the past, and would certainly be able to tell that story to their children, perhaps on the bicentennial of the war.

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