Clem Bevans the MVP
I was thinking the other day about Clem Bevans, an actor best known for playing “eccentric, grumpy old men”, according to Wikipedia. Upon further investigation, I noticed that he died in 1963 and was born in 1879. 1879. Eighteen seventy nine?! that’s like 14 years after slavery was abolished, I thought, and he died in the sixties?! Thus ensuing a late night rabbit hole and discussion with my friends on how quickly time moves and how close the past really is. As a lover of history, I am constantly flabbergasted at how much of it melts together. Things happen simultaneously that you would never expect. It’s like that famous tumblr post where it lists stuff like how the guillotine was last used the year Star Wars came out, or how Oxford University had been around for 300 years when the Aztec empire was formed. Stuff like that blows my mind, but, apparently, even more so is the timeline of Clem Bevans. He could easily have heard stories from his dad fighting in the Civil War, have Victorian childhood memories, served in WWI, lived through the Great Depression, have had one of his sons serve in WWII, see the rise of the suburbanism, the baby boom, the start of the civil rights era, the rise of the Beatles. One of his daughters died in 2007, the same year the first iPhone came out. Cars were only invented when he was 7 years old. That's wild.
Maybe just that’s a lot to say very little, but the constant interweaving of historical events reminds me how time is less of a thread and more like a tapestry, with millions of stories happening all at once, thousands of beginnings, endings, changes, and choices happening every second. It’s amazing and overwhelming at the same time, and reminds me again of the wonderful complexity of being human.