Our Permanent Record

Earlier this week, I worked with the big guy as he dug into a class project. It was a family history project, in which he had to gather original documentation of a particular ancestor and then assemble a narrative of their life.

The ancestor we went with was his great-great grandmother, Ella Sandidge Furman. Ella was born in 1881, and was something of a rarity for women of her time. She was not just literate, but a college graduate, and was president of the Hollins University class of 1900. As my eldest son explored her life, he had access not just to records of her birth and her marriage, up to and including a tintype of her on her marriage day. He also had her diaries from between the ages of 14 and 16, and a small leatherbound book of daily remembrances she wrote to mark the birth of her daughter.

As my tweener boy pored over the daily writing of a young woman who would eventually give birth to his great-grandfather, he wondered what she would think if she knew that 125 years later, he would be sitting and reading them.

Which got me to wondering...how much of what we write and produce now will convey across that span of time? Of the billions of text messages and tweets and Facebook status updates that shimmer and sparkle before our eyes now, how much of it will stick around? I think the answer may be that most of it will be lost, vanished in the vast chaos of the churning interwebs.

Or, worse yet, it won't be lost. It'll stick around. All of it. Every last tweet. Every last status update. Our great, great grandchildren will look back at us, and be bored witless. Sorting through the terabytes of data, our endless party pictures and gibbering over our latest consumer acquisition and lolspeak, they'll marvel at our inability to really say anything at all.

Strange Webs

Yesterday, while waiting for my boys outside of religious school, I peered upward and saw a small stick hovering in midair. It floated eight feet above the ground, mostly lost in the background of the tree. I grew curious, and came closer.

It was not, fortunately, floating on it's own. That'd have been a bit too freakish. It was suspended from two threads of spider silk. I followed the strands upwards, and saw that they were connected to the triangular web of a mid-sized orb spider. The weight of the stick was providing the tension that gave the web it's form.

I stood there for a while, marveling at it. How could this have been made? The stick was twenty times the size of the spider, and more than 100 times it's weight. Arachnids are strong, but not that strong. It was far too high above the ground to have been pulled up by the spider, and too heavy. It could not have been intentionally cut from a branch, as spiders generally don't have access to power tools.

Perhaps the stick had been part of a prior web, and had broken off and swung down, inverting the existing structure. But it was perfectly balanced and level, with the two connecting strands neatly placed...and there were no branches directly above it.

I attempted to take a picture, but couldn't capture it with the puny onboard camera of an iPhone. So I drew it, in my clumsy sketching way.

Creation can be an marvelously odd place.