2050

The old lady sat with a folded paper across her lap, a small child’s fingers curling around the wisps of white hair that surrounded the nape of the ladies neck.

SC: “Grandma, why is your hair so white?”
OL: “Because when you reach your 90th year, all the color in your hair disappears.”
SC: “Because you are old?”
OL: “Yes, because I’m older than YOU”. She reaches out to tickle the small child.
SC: (thoughtfully) “Grandma, my Grandma is your DAUGHTER?”
OL: “Yes, she is, your Grandma was once my little girl, you know that” she smiled at her retelling of it.
SC: “When there were still cars, right Grandma”? Her voice squeaked, her pitch high.
OL: “Yep, we had cars and we had telephones and DVD players to watch our movies on our T.V’s”.
SC: “How come you had telephones?”
OL: “That was before we had tele-communicators to take our pictures, and to show our movies and let us talk to each other through our HD-TV’s”

The old lady thought back to the old days - my, it was such a big deal that we had a woman and a black man running for president back in 2008, why I can’t believe we still differentiated between the black race and the Asian race and the whiter race back in my younger years. The races were so mingled anyway, with the first black president being half white and half black; we only concentrated on the black part. Silly. The white race, the total minority of races, my hair is whiter than the so called “white race”. All the browns and beiges and taupe’s of race, who would have thought that it would once have mattered, all those years ago. Who still calls out the color of ones skin, ones genes? It’s not those who were proud to be all mixed up. No, it’s the ones seeking superiority, that’s for sure. I’m proud to have lived past that era. Proud that we have all lived past the age of looking down on our inherited gene pools that defined who we are but rather we have made our ancestors proud by judging each other on the basic principles of character, and not that of race, or sex, or religion.

OL: “Honey, will you go get Grandma a non-carbonated beverage?”
SC: “The kind you used to drink called WATER?”
OL: “Yes baby, that one”.

Oh, the world has changed in so many ways, most for the good, but water, what has become of simple unpolluted, unfiltered water?