A few weeks ago, my grandson who is a freshman in college, went to see friends at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst. I told Sam that my father, his great-grandfather, entered what was then Massachusetts Agricultural College, “Mass Aggie,” in the mid-1920s. His response was, “WOW! That’s a long time ago.” Sam, will turn nineteen soon, roughly the same age as my dad when he went to college. 

What I realized from this brief exchange was how different one hundred years may be perceived by him compared to me. Sam has lived about nineteen percent of one hundred years, whereas I have been around for eighty-six percent of that span. Sam and I do share a period within the twenty-first century, but my life reaches back to before his parents were born. 

Of course, I don’t remember when my dad was in college because I wasn’t there. When I was Sam’s age in 1957, I thought that 1927 was ancient history. Now, it doesn’t feel that a hundred years is such an unfathomable stretch since I have already existed for the greater part of a century. 

Sam and I can both look at the sepia-toned photographs of young fraternity brothers – including my dad –  dressed in ill-fitting wool suits and vests. We can’t know the color of these outfits – brown, grey, tweed. Old photos don’t reveal details. We see a bunch of serious-looking guys with pomaded hair. Sam and I can ponder this antique image. If we try, we can imagine that these stiffly-posed men from a past era are no different from Sam and his friends. They went to classes, worked to get passing grades, played sports and musical instruments (football and tuba for my dad), struggled through relationships, had new experiences, participated in competitions, and wrestled with insecurities. 

Because I have existed so much more than my grandson, I can understand growing-up processes. I know about my dad’s life-course, have had my personal evolution, went through kids’ pathways into adulthood, and now see what’s playing out with grandchildren. The big percentage of one hundred that I have lived has given me a perspective that Sam (or any of my grandkids) can’t possibly have. They will gain their own insights with more time. 

Their experiences, so far, are both similar and vastly different from either my parents, myself, or their mom and dad. When my father was in college, the Ford Model A was the most popular car; to make a long-distance telephone call you had to call the operator; and newspapers and radio were how you got the news. Since that era, there have been huge technological advances that are familiar to Sam and his parents, but present some challenges for me like the internet and artificial intelligence. The decades that Sam will live through are bound to be very divergent from my own. As it was with previous generations, the reality of Sam’s one hundred years will keep shifting as technology, science, and world and national circumstances change. I will never comprehend his full picture just as he may not identify with mine. I do know that all of us will continue to create and encounter new realities, but will experience the same age-old, human ups and downs of those who lived so long ago.