We easily lose the perspective of even the relatively recent past.

Growing up, my father's career was in the international oil industry.  We lived in six countries on four continents and traveled to many more countries.  In that era (1955-1975) telecommunications were rudimentary.

In all countries, a long distance international call was exorbitantly expensive - something for companies, not for personal use.  Faxes were the exotic new technology.  Telegrams were still common.  Handwritten letters were the most common form of distant communication.  

My mother, from early on, supplemented the hand written letters with tape recordings which she made.  At first on reel-to-reels and then later on cassettes.  She would send them once a month or once a quarter back to her mother and her in-laws in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  

My sister recently came across one of these old cassettes and digitized it.  It is about a 45 minute story-telling from my mother in the Fall of 1974 it seems.  My mother passed in 2023 and it is a wonderfully eery experience to hear her voice speaking to me across 51 years.  A voice from long ago and feeling so present.  A quick dip into a distantly remembered past.  She was then only 42, quite a bit younger than I am now.  I was only 15.

She covers big news (my father and uncle's helicopter crashing in the Baltic Sea on their way to an offshore oil rig - all survived, wet and cold but uninjured) and the mundane.  She passes messages to other members of the family and inquires about news of yet others.  

But listening to this wonderful vignette, I can't help but also recollect the larger historical context.  She was always careful to shield my grandmother from some of the more exotic, unfamiliar or dangerous aspects of international living.  

I am always profoundly skeptical of those who imagine an idyllic past when things were uniformly better.  This era in Europe between 1965-75 was a wonderful one where most of western Europe finally really began to grow again after all the ravages of World War II and the disruptions of decolonization.  It was, in some ways, idyllic.

But it was also the era with the nuclear armed Soviet Union and all its armored divisions hovering over western Europe; IRA terrorists in Britain; Basque terrorists in Spain and France; Baader-Meinhof in Germany; PLA all over; and so many others.  Probably there wasn't ever more than a month or two in that whole period without some major bombing, or hijacking, or kidnapping with associated deaths.  Not infrequently, multiple attacks somewhere in Europe in any given month.  

As expatriates, and therefore favored targets, we routinely took precautions, even as school children, of changing our route to school, planning escape routes, planning in advance should something happen, where to take shelter, etc.

Even in peaceful and neutral Sweden, there were incidents.  While we were there, an SAS flight was hijacked by Croatian Nationalists in 1972.  Fortunately there was a peacefully negotiated outcome.

In 1973 there was the infamous Norrmalmstorg robbery in Stockholm giving us the notorious concept of Stockholm Syndrome.

The Baader-Meinhof group attacked the German embassy there in Stockholm just a few months after the tape from my mother was sent.  Two of the German diplomats were executed.  We knew one of them and I attended school with their children.

I recall the expatriate community banding together helping the widows and their families with meals and company, etc.  It was a memorable experience as fifteen-year-old, seeing small town American civic norms translated far away into an inconceivable situation.

All the American wives in the expatriate community calling one another, coordinating who would have which shifts sitting with the bereaved families (alone as those families were in a foreign land with a different language, laws and customs), who was responsible for transporting them wherever they needed to go, who was responsible for which meals.  It started with the American wives but pretty soon all expatriate wives were part of the support group. 

 

I still remember sitting in the kitchen watching my Mom make a meal for another family, explaining what had happened and that cooking was one of the small things you did to make things even a tiny bit easier for others going through unimaginable loss.  

All these things seem to slip from the common consciousness and awareness so quickly, overtaken by present concerns in a current world which is staggeringly more wealthy, healthier, easier to live in and at far greater peace.  Our current worries are always top priority and we easily lose the perspective of even the relatively recent past.