Having spent many years traveling around the world while serving in the Military Service, I recently returned the a town near where I spent the first six years of my childhood to settle down and enjoy a more relaxed middle life. Now was the perfect opportunity to visit places which had been only a memory for so long. Places that were so dear to me back when I was discovering such amazing things as caterpillars, butterflies, bumble bees and June bugs.
Grandpa, as I remembered, had a big farm with a cow, a horse, a pasture, a big lake, chickens, a big house and a large field that was almost always planted in something. I spent many happy hours there chasing butterflies and June bugs or throwing rocks into the lake. I especially liked going to the barn to watch the evening milking. I was never awake early enough for the morning milking. I always carried my little tin cup with me to get it filled with milk, warm and fresh from the cow. The only farm chores I was allowed to help with were feeding the chickens, gathering eggs and picking tomatoes. "Only the red ones please." grandma would say.
Dobson's General Store and Post Office, where grandpa went to get his mail and buy just about everything else he needed, was only a short distance from my grandpa's farm. It was a huge place with great long shelves and tables lined up creating long aisles. There was a huge pot-bellied stove right in the middle-most part of the store where the local men would sit around on cold, rainy days talking about farming, politics and playing checkers.
The tables were always stacked high with overalls, socks, brogans, shirts, shoes, bolts of cloth and just about any thing people needed back then. The shelves were stacked with assorted canned goods, sugar, flour, salt and other food items. A glass-covered case of pocket knives was conspicuously displayed on the front counter next to the huge cash register (The kind with large numbers that popped up in a glass window on top.) The huge glass cookie and candy jars with their shiny tin lids were placed on a shelf behind the cash register well out of reach but not out of sight.
In the rear of the store to the right were nails, hammers, saws, chains, hinges and all manner of hardware items for repairing almost anything around the farm that was broken. Hanging from the ceilings and walls were plow points, harnesses and all those amazing implements used for tilling the soil, as well as lanterns, like the one grandpa carried to the barn to see how to milk before sunrise. The left rear corner of the store was caged-in and served as the post office.
I visited what was once my grandpa's farm and found that while not much had changed, somehow everything looked different. The fir st thing that caught my eye was the lake. To my amazement it seemed much smaller. It was more a farm pond than it was the lake of my childhood memory. The pasture seemed smaller too, as did the field that once produced an abundance of fresh vegetables. The big house that my grandparents lived in now looked very much like and ordinary six room frame house painted white.
A mile up the road I found Dobson's General Store still standing and to my amazement, open for business, I stopped and went inside and see what it was like now. I immediately recognized the elderly lady behind the now modern checkout counter as Mr. Dobson's daughter even though she was now grey-haired and 40 years older. After reminding her whose grandson I was, she remembered me. We talked at length about the days gone by and as we talked, I surveyed the interior of the store, comparing what I was now seeing with memories I had filed away in the archives of my mind 40 years ago. Nothing inside the store was as I remembered. All the farm implements were gone, the post office was gone, the tables stacked high with clothing articles were gone, and the building that a six-year-old could get lost in was now filled with pre-packed quick food items relevant to the 1980, stacked on modern shelves or hung from pegboards. The pot-bellied stove was gone, having been replaced by central heat and cooling. The store seemed much smaller somehow although I'm sure it wasn’t. I could now stand at the front counter and survey the entire store. Somehow the world of my childhood memories had gotten smaller.
I sat quietly in the evening hours of that day, contemplating all that I had seen. I was unable to think of a reasonable explanation for the difference between what I remembered and what I had seen. I began to wonder if it could possibly be true. Is the size of the world relative to the age and physical size of the person viewing it? Could it just be possible that Einstein was so caught up in his theory of relativity that he overlooked another important fact, that the size of the world is relative to the size of the individual viewing it?
Grandpa, as I remembered, had a big farm with a cow, a horse, a pasture, a big lake, chickens, a big house and a large field that was almost always planted in something. I spent many happy hours there chasing butterflies and June bugs or throwing rocks into the lake. I especially liked going to the barn to watch the evening milking. I was never awake early enough for the morning milking. I always carried my little tin cup with me to get it filled with milk, warm and fresh from the cow. The only farm chores I was allowed to help with were feeding the chickens, gathering eggs and picking tomatoes. "Only the red ones please." grandma would say.
Dobson's General Store and Post Office, where grandpa went to get his mail and buy just about everything else he needed, was only a short distance from my grandpa's farm. It was a huge place with great long shelves and tables lined up creating long aisles. There was a huge pot-bellied stove right in the middle-most part of the store where the local men would sit around on cold, rainy days talking about farming, politics and playing checkers.
The tables were always stacked high with overalls, socks, brogans, shirts, shoes, bolts of cloth and just about any thing people needed back then. The shelves were stacked with assorted canned goods, sugar, flour, salt and other food items. A glass-covered case of pocket knives was conspicuously displayed on the front counter next to the huge cash register (The kind with large numbers that popped up in a glass window on top.) The huge glass cookie and candy jars with their shiny tin lids were placed on a shelf behind the cash register well out of reach but not out of sight.
In the rear of the store to the right were nails, hammers, saws, chains, hinges and all manner of hardware items for repairing almost anything around the farm that was broken. Hanging from the ceilings and walls were plow points, harnesses and all those amazing implements used for tilling the soil, as well as lanterns, like the one grandpa carried to the barn to see how to milk before sunrise. The left rear corner of the store was caged-in and served as the post office.
I visited what was once my grandpa's farm and found that while not much had changed, somehow everything looked different. The fir st thing that caught my eye was the lake. To my amazement it seemed much smaller. It was more a farm pond than it was the lake of my childhood memory. The pasture seemed smaller too, as did the field that once produced an abundance of fresh vegetables. The big house that my grandparents lived in now looked very much like and ordinary six room frame house painted white.
A mile up the road I found Dobson's General Store still standing and to my amazement, open for business, I stopped and went inside and see what it was like now. I immediately recognized the elderly lady behind the now modern checkout counter as Mr. Dobson's daughter even though she was now grey-haired and 40 years older. After reminding her whose grandson I was, she remembered me. We talked at length about the days gone by and as we talked, I surveyed the interior of the store, comparing what I was now seeing with memories I had filed away in the archives of my mind 40 years ago. Nothing inside the store was as I remembered. All the farm implements were gone, the post office was gone, the tables stacked high with clothing articles were gone, and the building that a six-year-old could get lost in was now filled with pre-packed quick food items relevant to the 1980, stacked on modern shelves or hung from pegboards. The pot-bellied stove was gone, having been replaced by central heat and cooling. The store seemed much smaller somehow although I'm sure it wasn’t. I could now stand at the front counter and survey the entire store. Somehow the world of my childhood memories had gotten smaller.
I sat quietly in the evening hours of that day, contemplating all that I had seen. I was unable to think of a reasonable explanation for the difference between what I remembered and what I had seen. I began to wonder if it could possibly be true. Is the size of the world relative to the age and physical size of the person viewing it? Could it just be possible that Einstein was so caught up in his theory of relativity that he overlooked another important fact, that the size of the world is relative to the size of the individual viewing it?
