Thursday, January 20, 2011

How memory works

Today is my Aunt Ella's birthday. Were she still alive, she'd be 107 years old. (She died in 2001 at age 98). I had forgotten the occasion was pending, and I remembered it only because Keith Olberman said on his broadcast last night, in one of those this-day-in-history" comments, that on Jan. 19, 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII exchanged history's first transatlantic wireless telegrams.

How did that piece of trivia remind me of Aunt Ella's ? In 1993, when my aunt turned 90, I gave her a newspaper from the day she was born, and the telegrams were the subject of a brief story on Page 1. The other news of the day was unexceptional. The big headline of the day was a fire. It was a New York paper that has long since gone out of business (I forget the title), but I do recall a large fire in one of the outer boroughs.

Now it strikes me that I don't know what happened to the paper when Aunt Ella died.

1 comment:

Lynn Kendall said...

Interesting; my grandfather's 100th birthday was January 20. (He died in 1994.) I posted the my memoir on Facebook.