Letter to a Great Grandson by Hugh Downs

Author:Hugh Downs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Four great-grandparents: Norman and Barbara Montee, Ruth and Hugh Downs, and a very young you

Fifth Decade:

Forty to Fifty

Before this ten years is over, Xander, you will have run through the first half of the new century. (It doesn’t take long to demolish a century, I have found. I have now lived in all four quarters of the twentieth century and one of the twenty-first.)

You are still prime. If there is now in the world some control of viral infections, and new forms of dangerous microbes have been held at bay, most remaining diseases will be degenerative, so that means a statistical increase in diseases not caused by bacteria, viruses, or prions. But by staving off the onset of degenerative disorders, which I imagine medical science will have got a handle on by now, you and your cohorts should be enjoying much greater life expectancy. I am guessing that before you are fifty, life expectancy will be eighty-three for men and eighty-four for women. Contrast that with expectancy at the time I’m writing this—seventy-four for men and seventy-eight for women. (The gap between men and women will have narrowed because female lifestyles may be more similar to male’s.) Or contrast it with life expectancy at the time Queen Victoria died (1901): about forty-nine for both men and women.

And we not only live longer; we live more per day, week, year, than previous generations. My grandfather Sherman Downs lived his life in Ohio within a short radius of his farm in Champaign County. He made one trip to Kansas and one to New York—the latter during WWI. His oldest son, my uncle Malcolm, was ill with influenza in an army hospital, and they thought he was going to die. (He didn’t but many did, from that flu epidemic.) The provincial nature of life in the rural Midwest back then is shown up in a story (possibly apocryphal) that I heard when I was little. When my grandfather got back from the New York trip, a neighbor is reported to have said to him, “Been to New York, eh, Sherm?” Gramp said yes. The neighbor asked, “Who runs the hotel there now?”

I contrast my grandfather’s travels with my own. By the mid-sixties I had lost track of how many times I had flown from one coast to the other. As members of the Circumnavigators’ Club, your great-grandmother and I were asked how many times we had been around the world. It was either four or five, but we couldn’t be sure. Several times we have been to the other side of the planet and come home by continuing in the same direction—circling the globe. But on one trip we really can’t remember whether we came back the way we had gone or continued on around!

The amount of information we process with all the media and available entertainments we have is many times that of nineteenth-century citizens. So we crowd more life into our years, and have more years than they did.

A high point

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