COVID-19 | HISTORY
2020: The Year That History Became Real
A year like none other
Throughout most of my life, the past felt like a fictional concept. To hear the stories my grandparents told of bygone cars and wars and inventions felt like the aged hard candies of their timeworn tin reaching out to grab me.
As a child, I never envisioned the adults they once were, or the careers they once led, or the strange times they, too, once lived through. Those tales they told were from a different place in time. The faded events felt nearly as distant as the dinosaurs.
Even with my father’s stories, there was a degree of removal. He would tell of the most momentous events from within his life, but there was always a wall of detachment.
I couldn’t understand what it was like to live through the Vietnam War, the counterculture protests, or the flower power movement. However ornate his language or however sober his stories, there was an element of fantasy that always surrounded that place we call the past.
“You can’t imagine what it was like growing up during the Nixon administration. It was like a new front page development every morning,” he would say with the solemn sigh of bad days gone by. I couldn’t quite picture it myself. But watching All the President’s Men at his…
