My Mother’s American Century
By some measures America’s 250th birthday puts a worthy notch in the historic timeline. A quarter-millennium is respectable, but we’re young compared with the oldest republic (San Marino, founded in 301) and a blink of the eye for Egypt, which unified into a single state more than 5,000 years ago. Closer to home, modern Canada is 159 years old, while Mexico counts 205 years since its independence from Spain.
Mom, more widely known as Peggy, recently attended a family gathering that included an 8-month-old great-grandson named Charlie and Charlie’s other living great-grandmother, Jody. Both grandmas reminded me how young America is and how much it has changed, mostly for the better.
Using mom’s life span as a yardstick puts things in perspective. Go back 98 years from her birth in 1928, and you’re at 1830, a mere 54 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed and 31 years before the start of the Civil War, during which mom’s grandfather would serve in Robert E. Lee’s signal corps. Go back one more life span and it’s 1732, the year George Washington was born.
Her life, like America’s, has been rich in challenges. Her father deserted the family early on, leaving her mother to raise two daughters at a time when women were at a significant disadvantage in the job market. They never owned a car and for a time had to cook meals on a hot plate. “We were poor,” mom is fond of saying, “but we didn’t know we were poor.” She and her sister later went to college on scholarships and lived out their own American Dreams. Her sister, who went to work for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, had a daughter who became a plastic surgeon and a son who became a doctor. Mom’s kids did well too, save for the son who became a hack writer.
