A Letter To Saxon (Don't Open Until 2011)   

Here's what you can expect from now on, and what to do about it.

Dear Saxon,

Before I forget, I want to tell you what you can expect for the rest of your life. I know you won't pay any attention to this until you turn 18. Just hit Save. Seventeen years will go by faster than you think.

Expect the unexpectable.

That's about it.

As for how you do this, and with the hope that you will live a long and good life, I suggest you take the approach of your great-great-grandfather, George Reese, for whom I'm named. He was just short of 100 when he died not far from your home in Georgia. We think he holds the family's lifetime record for life time, at least for the current millennium.

It's doubtful that any of our relatives on your mother's side lived longer in earlier millennia. That was before peach juice. Keep drinking your peach juice.

When he was born, the United States was less than a century old. He lived all his life in the United States. (He missed being born in the Confederate States of America by just two years and was spared living in that country by a set of fortuitous events that I will not go into. Our family's current position on this is clear: We're just pleased as we can be that he was born in the United States.)

He lived during the first century in the history of the world that turned into a cyclone. When he was born, people used lamp wicks about the same way they once had lit torches in caves. The way most people traveled would have been familiar to Nebuchadnezzar.

Then, during his life, came electricity, the telephone, the telegraph, the auto, the airplane, radio, television, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Alan Turing, James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, nuclear energy, the discovery of DNA, the first explorations of some parts of the earth, and travel through space.

Apart from that, his own immediate world changed from feudal agrarian to industrial consumerist. Unfortunately, the cotton gin had been invented before he came along, and that screwed up your entire home state and all the others around it for a century or so. But democracy finally was established. So was air conditioning. As you will find out, little inventions can change everything.

I can alert you that in a few years, probably sometime between 2015 and 2085, you will see the invention of the bioturb, the artichokerus and the monastic fly-in. By then the people in my field will be worrying about whether the gannetts and turnavids are about to be replaced by some comform that will sploo their jasks or investabites, and journacom profichers will be fretting about how to plumb the spherocoms and keep their acads up to data for the grafopaps.

Be like your GGG. Take it in without too much of a fuss. He slid from one entire era to another with grace and aplomb, charming all the ladies along the way, because he knew how to be true to himself, and he never listened too much to the noise.

Onward,

GRC

P.S. Your parents were probably right about your name, even for the 21st century. Believe it or not, assumptions are made about people just because of a name, so a gender-free handle has its advantages. Yours will be just right for the '44 presidential ballot. l