There is a living creature, which will be like my friend Dave, and my friend Jordan, but it will not be either of them. This is strange to me. They call it “Little Swimmer”; it is expected to be a girl. The name is a placeholder; I’m sure they’ll think of a better name in the next couple of months. But, for now, it’s strangely appropriate.
There’s something strange about this. They are not my first friends to get married. They are not my first friends to have kids. They are not the first people I knew in school to have kids. But… It’s Dave. I’ve known Dave for a long time, and it’s weird enough for him to be married, but Dave having kids is just weird.
Right now, I don’t even know whether this is a “person”, or just a lump of tissue which will be a person. Who could tell? How would we know? But, in all probability, there will be a person one day. And, in all probability, she will live to remember things that I will never see. She will never see the dawn of the computer age; she will not see computers move from a strange thing which large corporations and universities have, in specially conditioned rooms, to appliances you can buy just about anywhere. She will not see these things. In her life, a resolution of 320x240 will be pathetically small. Cell phones will be commonplace. The internet will be a mere fact of life. We will tell her stories of the world in which we grew up, and they will be strange to her.
This is strange, and wonderful. The “miracle of birth” is really no big thing, but generations sometimes scare me.
I wonder if she’ll read this.
Comments [archived]
From: jess
Date: 2006-10-21 11:12:21 -0500
i am skard to wetmy bad