115 and COUNTING

by Leigh Lundin

I grew up in Shelby County, Indiana. It’s a land of covered bridges, county fairs, tractor pulls, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, soapbox derbies, and pioneer stories. When I was a kid, people didn’t lock their doors, really. They didn’t lock up their daughters either, which was a wonderful thing for me.

Don’t get me wrong: The area’s moral without being sanctimonious. People accepted that mistakes would happen and once made, they expected them to be set right. Problems were usually dealt with privately and quietly. Politicians debated respectfully without sneers and slurs. Given my family, eccentricity was not only tolerated, but often welcomed as entertainment.

My mother’s family settled there two centuries ago. My brother Glen lives in the county seat of Shelbyville and he drew my attention to a special birthday today. The 20^th of April is the 115^th birthday of Edna Parker, believed to be the world’s oldest woman.

She’s outlived both sons and both sisters. She’s a little slower these days but she’s still sharp and knows what she wants: birthday cake.

Most news articles focus on her ‘feat’, her longevity, her foods, and her near scrape with death when she was lost in a snow bank for some hours at age 100.

What amazes me, however, are the changes she’s witnessed.

• She was born the same day as silent screen comedian, Harold Lloyd.
• That January, Benjamin Harrison stepped down as President, succeeded by Grover Cleveland, assuming his discontiguous 2^nd term in office.
• Most women could not vote. Indeed, that year New Zealand become the first nation in the world to grant women suffrage. (Some states had already given women the right to vote.)
• U.S. Marines invaded Hawaii, overthrowing the government of Queen Liliuokalani.
• Thomas Edison received Patent 492,150 for "A Process of Coating Conductors for Incandescent Lamps."
• The first record of a college basketball game occured in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.
• The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair opened.
• The US Supreme Court legally declared the tomato to be a vegetable. (It’s actually a fruit, but politicians have to stick their oar in.)
• Mahatma Gandhi defied Britain.
• Brothers Charles and Frank Duryea drove the first gasoline powered motorcar in America on public roads.
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky died.

Imagine her perspective:

• She was born in a time without motorcars yet lived to see men land on the moon.
• She’s witnessed two world wars and numerous smaller ones.
• She’s watched nations rise and fall, including the Soviet Union which formed when she was 29 years old.
• She’s seen 20 presidents come and go… thus far.
• She’s watched Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Utah become states.

The candle of human existence burns swift and brief; it’s difficult to imagine the continuum of this woman’s life. If anyone had tried to predict the changes she would encounter, they would have been thought mad, a victim of the fiction of Jules Verne. In centuries past, she would have experienced little change, but the acceleration of invention has been exponential.

As writers, it gives us pause, a chance to adjust our perspective, not only about the evolution of change, but also what’s important in life… and what’s not.

Happy birthday, Edna!