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Showing posts with the label Gertrude Raymer

Yesterday - Today - Tomorrow

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Edward Raymer (natural father) and me I really hate to admit this but I have passed an invisible line in life where my life is now a vivid contrast between a world I knew as a young boy and the world of today.   I have always wondered when this would happen.   When did my grandmother begin recanting the vastly historic and different world of her childhood, in the face of computers and internet?   Now I am becoming the old guy that shares stories of an intangible past to young people of today who, quietly wonder how did people in my generation survive such barbarism.   I think it often starts with technology because this is area where we can see the most visible change in our lives.  Paper to typewriters to computer screens, the evolution is dramatic.  It might be difficult for a young person today to comprehend but “in my day,” television was simple and almost unrecognizable in its current form.  I witnessed black and white tv’s evolve into to color.   The end of the aerial (that's

Mementos of the Past

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The first time I remember confronting death was as a child.  My mother took me to visit my paternal grandmother and grandfather in a Los Angeles suburb.  It was the kind of place that the original boom California generation moved to as a relief for what central Los Angeles had become. I was twelve years old and my memories of my grandfather were limited as we had moved north to Alaska when I was two years old.  I had only seen him a couple of times since then and those memories were clouded in the fog of early youth.  Memories colored by photographs that likely don’t recall but simply recreate a memory that had left the mind or been buried within its deep recesses.    My grandfather was debilitated.  He sat in his naugahyde recliner with a blanket wrapped around him watching reruns of Bonanza and Big Valley.  He was suffering from brain cancer and his time was limited but when you are young, and have no concept of death, time seems to have little finality.  For a young mind, Gra