Sometimes when you least expect it, life breaks your heart.
The world has changed so much since I was born in the last month of the 1940s, and the changes have had both good and bad effects. When I was born, the only way to keep in touch was writing letters or making phone calls when people lived more than a few hours away.
And if the people you were trying to keep in touch with were on the other side of an ocean, calls had to go through a cable lying on the floor of the ocean. Even long distance calls from one state to another had to go through operators.
Imagine an America without interstate highways, and in most cases, without even what we now call bypasses. We lived just 120 miles from my grandparents in central Ohio, but it was a three-hour drive.
The first so-called superhighway I remember was anything but super. When we drove from Ohio to New York City in the late 1950s, a big part of our trip was on toll roads — first on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and then on the New Jersey Turnpike. When we got to NYC, we had to go through two tunnels to get to Brooklyn. It wasn’t until November 1964 that the Verrazano Narrows Bridge opened and we were able to avoid Manhattan.
When I was young, New York was thrilling and exciting to me. Ballgames at Yankee Stadium, including a July 4th doubleheader in 1961. Zoos and amusement parks, Broadway shows and World’s Fairs.
Ohio was, well, boring.
But looking back, so many of my most wonderful memories are of summers in Ohio. I never had the opportunity to play organized youth sports, but summers visiting my grandparents in Crestline, I went to the park and got into organized games nearly every day. I learned that I actually was a fairly decent player for my age.
And of course, there were the family get-togethers with our Columbus cousins.
I’m the person in the upper right of the photo. I was 12 that summer, and I am the oldest person in the picture who is still living. My pretty cousin Marti to the left of me is nine months younger than I am. The youngest person in the picture will be 62 later this year.
The last time I spoke with two of my four cousins was in 2008 at my father’s funeral and the last time I saw the other two was in 1990 at my grandmother’s funeral.
Since we moved away from Ohio in 1963, I have lived in eight states and two countries. I seriously doubt I would have spent my life there if we hadn’t moved, away, but I wonder how different things would have been.
Two of my four cousins have spent their entire lives in Ohio, while the other two lives in Illinois and Virginia. Of my four siblings, two still live in Virginia, while the other two are in Ohio and Massachusetts.
The world gets bigger and bigger. My two children — the next generation — have lived or worked on six different continents, every one except Antarctica. We don’t see them all that often.
There’s irony in the whole moving around thing, since kids usually have very little say in where their parents go. I was born in California and my parents moved east when I was less than a year old. When I was living in California 40-some years later, I used to joke with people that I knew moving was a bad idea but they wouldn’t listen to me.
I actually didn’t have any more say in the move from Ohio to Virginia when I was 13.
Kids rarely do.
And as often as not, when the family moves, the kids lose.
.