Of Human Bridges

by Pa Rock
Man in the Middle                

(Note:  I have Christmas shopping for my younger grandkids down to an art form:  they tell me exactly what they want, often through a web link, and I make the purchase and have it sent directly to their homes.  Easy, peasy.  Ho, ho, ho!     This year I decided to mix things up a bit, and in addition to the requested gifts, I also sent an "in-home drone" - one of those small flying saucers that have been advertised all over the internet as of late - to my daughter and son who still have young children at home - as well as one to each of my four nieces and nephews and their families.)

Molly replied a few days ago with an email video of her three youngsters squealing and chasing their flying saucer around the living room.  I replied that it looked like "too much fun," which probably is an impossibility, but it clearly was an ample amount of fun - apparently for the whole family!

Then this morning the first message that I pulled up on email was a note from Tim with a photo of his four-year-old, Sully, staring utter amazement at the flying saucer hovering over his dining room table!

That set me to waxing philosophical.  

I thought about my grandfather, Dan Sreaves, a man whom I knew well and admired a great deal.  Granddad was born in northwest Arkansas in 1888 and migrated to Missouri as a twelve-year-old with his parents and younger siblings at the turn of the 20th century.  They made that arduous trip with all of their worldly possessions packed into two horse-drawn wagons.   

Granddad had been born at a time when homes did not have electricity or running water, and well before the advent of cars, airplanes, radio, and television.  He lived to be eighty-two-years-old, and never moved more than a few miles from where his parents had settled at the beginning of the century.   Before my granddad died he had owned and operated several vehicles, had a color television set, and had flown to California on a jet airplane where he waded in the Pacific Ocean and even vitiated Disneyland!

Now here was my youngest grandson, Dan Sreaves g-g-grandson, watching a flying saucer buzz around the inside of his house.    That is Sully's life today, and today is just the barest of hints as to what tomorrow may bring.  With a little luck and healthy living, Sully will be around to peer into the next century - and who can imagine the things he will see and experience during the time it takes to get there!

My grandfather rode into Missouri on a horse-drawn wagon, and my grandson may fly out of Kansas on a personal drone - and I will have been the bridge between those two travelers, the person who enjoyed the unique privilege of knowing them both.

And that's what life is - a privilege!