The Past Is Not Dead

 The Past Is Not Dead

As the sound of the pipes rolled out of the laptop, I said, “You never got to hear your Grandpa George play his bagpipes. I wish you had. He loved his pipes, and loved playing them, and I loved hearing them.”

“Did he sound like this?” my youngest child said.

“More or less. He loved to play this tune, especially. ‘Land of my high endeavor, Scotland the Brave’” I sang along for a moment.

“Was he Scottish?”

“Not really. In fact, he said he wished he could identify a Scottish ancestor so he could feel justified in wearing a real clan tartan. Every clan has its own pattern. My mother has a Scottish ancestor, a MacFarlane, but she’s a long way back, like maybe your great-times-seven-grandmother.”

“My what?”

“Like, not your grandmother like Grandma Dorothy, and not your great-grandmother like my Grandma Zoe, but your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother,” I said, counting off the “greats” on my fingers. “Your grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother.”

“How long ago was that? A hundred years?”

“More like two hundred. Long enough ago that Miss MacFarlane, before she came to America, probably saw men wearing kilts for everyday wear, instead of pants.”

“It’s kind of weird that I’m connected to someone that far back.”

“We’re all connected that far back. And one of your other ancestors was a nobleman who could trace his ancestry back to one of the soldiers who helped William the Conqueror, um, conquer, a thousand years ago.”

“Whoa! Like, a knight in shining armor?”

“Not the kind of armor you’re thinking of. It hadn’t been invented yet.”

He shook his head.

“I feel like I’m floating, thinking about going back that far.”

“Well, that knight who fought for William probably didn’t know who his ancestors were, but you know that he had ancestors going back a thousand years more, to when Jesus was alive. Everybody does, or they wouldn’t be here now, would they?”

“And that ancestor had ancestors who were, what, like cavemen a thousand years before that.”

“You have caveman ancestors, of course, but they were’nt a thousand years before, more like fifty thousand.”

“How many ‘greats’ would that be?”

“I don’t even know. But even before the cavemen, you had ancestors who weren’t human yet. And the planet Earth and the Sun are our ancestors, because we came from them.”

“Uhhh….”

“And the Sun had an ancestor. We know it’s part of the second generation of stars, that are made up of matter that formed in earlier stars, or it would be only made up of hydrogen and helium, and so would its planets, and life could not have arisen on them.”

“So how far does the Sun’s ancestry go?”

“About fifteen billion years. That’s fifteen thousand thousand thousand.”

“What was there before that?”

“Nobody knows. That’s just when the Big Bang happened, and nobody can figure out what came before. Maybe the Universe had a Mom Universe, and a Grandma Universe, but nobody actually knows.”

“And we’re related to the whole Universe,” he said.

“Yep.”

The video ended, and he said, “Okay, now I’m going to pick a song. Type in ‘Five Nights At Freddy’s, Join Us For A Bite’.”

 

https://www.magzter.com/article/News/The-Atlantic/What-to-Do-About-William-Faulkner