Grandma’s Dream

By S.G. Benson

My mother’s mother sat me down in 1972, after my high school graduation.

I’ve seen more in my lifetime than I ever could have imagined. I hope your life will be filled with as much wonder as mine has been.

Tell me, I said, and she did:

When I was born in 1896, we traveled by horse and buggy. Today I drive a car. Just a few years ago, I watched on TV as Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. How can we have come so far?

Telephones were rare when I was a child. Now they have radio phones in a bag. That’s amazing!

I’ve seen the birth of radio, movies, and television. I can’t even imagine what will come next.

Our family survived the Spanish flu, and then we watched modern medicine blossom—today, smallpox and polio are gone. How can that be?

I witnessed the Great Depression, bracketed by two world wars. After, America grew and thrived, enthralled by new inventions. But some people remained behind, so we declared the War on Poverty, and we established civil rights protections for everyone. It’s not perfect now, but it’s better. I just know your lifetime will be even better than mine.

Until recently, I believed that I, too, have lived in an amazing and wonderful era. Grandma died in 1990, at the age of 94. I still miss her. Sometimes I call to her across time and space. Only her eternal optimism echoes back to me. 

Grandma, amazing and wonderful are not accurate descriptors. These are interesting times, yes, but also tragic, heart-wrenching, and miserable. Humanity has the capacity to do so much good, yet we’ve chosen a different path.

I just know your lifetime will be even better than mine.

Grandma, we live today in a contentious, fearful, and selfish world. Perhaps it’s only a reflection of my own increasing maturity, but it appears to me that the hopeful trajectory we were on during much of your life seems to have peaked during the late 1970s. I’ve watched it decline ever since. I don’t know now if we have simply reached the end of another pendulum swing, or if we are actually teetering on the brink of destroying ourselves and our planet. Please reply… 

I just know your lifetime will be even better than mine.

I feel empty.

S.G. (Sandy) Benson is a retired forester and journalist. She published My Mother’s Keeper: One Family’s Journey Through Dementia in 2021, and in 2024, Dear Folks: Letters Home 1943-1946 World War II, a collection of her father’s letters. Her short story, Rosebud Wacipi, won bronze in the 2024 North Carolina Senior Games/Literary Arts division, and an excerpt from My Mother’s Keeper garnered an honorable mention in the 2024 Northwind Writing Award. She is currently working on a memoir, “Girls Can’t Do That.”