Sad Events of Long Ago

Those of us who have been alive for seventy years or more are sometimes visited with a strange impulse: to take the middle-aged and the young in a firm grip and urge them to listen to the stories of our lives. We feel ourselves driven to interrupt wedding feasts and other such happy occasions. Of course, we don’t suppose our lives to be especially interesting in themselves; but we want to talk about what we have witnessed, at first or second hand, things that are…mere history, sad...