Why Bother?

My Grandfather was a very intelligent man.  When he was sixteen he graduated from Duke University with the highest grade point average that had been earned up to the year 1919.  He went on to earn a graduate degree from MIT and a PHd from Harvard.  He has several patents, one of which was used in the production of the nuclear bomb.  When Bell Labs was developing the Cellular Phone in the early 1970s, he was responsible for writing the technical manual.  I still remember him being able to make phone calls from his car, as if everyone could do that in the 1970s.

This is a small fraction of the things that he did in his lifetime.  Many things I do not know and probably will never know.  When he was getting close to his death several years ago, I realized that I really didn't know him.  (He would hate that I used a contraction.)  My grandparents moved from New Jersey to South Carolina, when I was a teenager.  That meant that we hardly ever saw them.  When we did, we heard lots of stories about the kids in their town.  They were very active in their church and I think that they acted as sort of surrogate grandparents to a lot of kids.

Just before my Grandfather died, we traveled down to his house to spend time with him.  We sat in his living room and told stories about our lives.  My Father, his two brothers and sister told stories about growing up in their house in New Jersey.  I'm not going to tell any of them right now, but soon I will.

I am writing this, because I don't want the story of my life to be told the way that he told his own.  In his final years he sat down and wrote an autobiography of his life.  It was about ten typed pages.  For a man that had worked so hard and taken part in so many incredible things; it was disappointing.  I realized that the story of a persons life is not just a list of events.  It is your thoughts and feelings.  It is the insight that you get from the person that was there.

One story that my grandfather told puts this into perspective.  For many months in the early 1940s he traveled to New Mexico to work on a project for the government.  He knew that what he was working on would be used in the war effort, but he had no idea where.  The government took the Philadelphia Project (the code name for the project that developed the nuclear bomb.) and divided it up into parts.  If none of the scientists knew the whole picture, or very few, the project was that much more secure.

One day when he was back in New Jersey, he was getting a haircut and a news reporter interrupted what was being broadcast on the radio to announce that a nuclear bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.  That was the moment that he realized what he had been working on.

I really don't know how he felt about the whole thing.  I don't know what song or radio show was on the radio.  Wouldn't it be great to know if they talked about it in the barbershop after the announcement?

So, what I want to do with this blog, is tell a story.  Maybe it will be a good one, maybe it will suck.  Either way, it will be my story.  It will be a look at the world though my eyes and I will tell it in pieces as it comes to me.  I want to know what I was thinking about now, when I get old and I hope that other people will be interested too.