Given Betty Friedan’s prediction of the soon-coming ice age in Harper’s Magazine of 1958, I suppose it makes sense that my dear late grandpa installed a wood stove in the house. In general, older folks never have been too keen on extreme cold; their circulation slows as they age, and it takes more and more to keep them warm.
This may also, I suppose, explain his penchant for hoarding large quantities of mayonnaise, salad dressing, strawberry cream cheese, pasta noodles, basically anything that was on sale. Crossing the frozen tundra of North Carolina to get to a Kroger was not something he would have been interested in, and Duke, the fat yet faithful family Dachshund, would not have made much of a sled dog.
Pastor Bo WagnerThankfully, her utterly scientific, airtight conclusion did not come to pass.
But it would not be the last harbinger of impending doom. Having survived 12 years from the time of Friedan’s prediction of an ice age, Grandpa came to the year 1970, in which Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.”
I was born in 1970. Even back then as a baby, I knew Grandpa was strangely distant and highly distracted. I had no way of knowing though that as he held me he was thinking “I wish I could have more time with this precious child; it is so sad to realize that he and I and everyone else on Earth will be dead in just over a decade.”