"Antiquity.............................."

Monday morning here, the beginning of a two-day work week for me, Thanksgiving providing another mini-vacation for we who toil within the Kentucky educational system. It’s a hard life, or at least it has its moments on either side of bringing home a paycheck. Frequent multiple days off help reduce my displeasure with other aspects of the job. Probably, however, my granddaughter will not be inquiring about such opinions when she interviews me this Thursday, her teacher at her school requiring her to explore and then put to print the memory of whomsoever is the oldest relative present at the feast. I’m not sure how I feel about such distinction finally coming to me, but, at this stage of the journey, looking back is actually one of my favorite activities, the view in the other direction not so much open anymore to the possibilities it once held. Dinosaurs were pretty well eradicated by the time I came along. Automobiles had been around a few years; man had learned to fly; but forget technology. What is amazing to me is just how greatly the world, in general, has changed in its thinking during the last seven decades! In this country, alone, racial bigotry may not be completely extinguished, yet there is no denying that we’ve come a long way from what we practiced in the late forties, early fifties. I am also astonished at how population here in our neck of the woods has become a multi-ethnic community, an area where anyone who lived in Ohio back when I was a child was considered “foreigners” by my grandparents and now a walk down any hallway of River Ridge Elementary will reveal an influx of Japanese, Burmese, Mexican, and half a dozen others. We have become not just globally minded in the sense of our being more conscious of others around the planet, but we are a mixture, more than ever, here in our own front yard. Add to such items the pollution of our moral values, brought about, as far as I’m concerned, by the evolution of our Christian theology, and this world is definitely nowhere near the image I held of it so long ago. What’s an old man’s opinion worth, though?......