Every year I post a digital birthday card for my grandfather– even if I apparently post nothing else the entire year–so here comes this year’s edition. This is Grampa as a young man of presently-unknown age.

Looks like it would be a high school graduation photo, but he graduated from high school at 22 and I think he was a bit younger than that here.

…

A few weeks ago, I was talking to my niece about our ancestors, and trying to put in perspective how long ago Grampa was born, how long he lived, and how much had changed in the meantime. That was a fun conversation. Was he alive for this president, or that war, or this assassination? Were there “wall phones”? Had this been discovered? Was that person alive? How many states were there? And so on.

This got me thinking about the simplest way to explain the most drastic change in his lifetime. The best I could come up with was that when he was born, there were no planes, and taking photographs using “dust” (flash powder) was expensive enough that we have very few pictures of him before age 10. By the time he died, we had close-up photos of Neptune.

Grampa would’ve turned 121 today if he hadn’t died stopping the salt vampires from stealing our oceans.