Rose Goldstein

My great-aunt, Rose Goldstein, passed away yesterday at age 105.

It got me thinking last night about all the inventions, novelties and events this woman saw in her lifetime:

- The airplane
- The radio receiver
- The bra
- Talkies (movies)
- Television
- Sliced bread
- Antibiotics
- The ballpoint pen
- Nuclear weapons
- The credit card
- The Polio vaccine
- Fiber optics
- Digital clocks
- FM synthesis
- The hard-drive
- Dolly, the cloned sheep

... and the list goes on and on (and on).

Rose lived through two World Wars, the Philippine American War, the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, the Israel-Arab conflicts, the Korean, Vietnam, India-Pakistan, Iran-Iraq, Falkland Islands, and Persian-Gulf wars, in addition to a handful of invasions and most recently, the war on Terror.

During Rose's lifetime there have been 19 U.S. Presidents beginning with Theodore Roosevelt and ending with our first African-American President, Barack Obama.

She was around when McCarthy's Communist witch-hunt began in the U.S. (1920), was an adult during the stock market crash and Great Depression, and I'm sure was in front of her TV to watch the U.S. astronauts land on the moon in 1969.

If I lived to be 105 years old the year would be 2068. It's difficult to fathom what the world will be like at that time. I'd like to think that there will be cures for many of the inflammatory diseases that plague us (cancer, heart disease, Parkinson's, obesity) and that we will be at least on the road to ending famine.

I would also like to think that should I live to be 105, I'll do so with the same grace that my great-aunt Rose did.

Peace.

Susan