We are informed by the Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, and poet George Santayana, that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

That has never been my problem.

I grew up immersed in family stories from both parents — some of them true, and some not so accurately remembered. Starting at about age three with Little Golden Books that my mom bought for a nickel each at local thrift stores, I have always been an avid reader. By the time I reached sixth grade, I was reading texts at graduate school level and mostly understanding what I read.

I had five older half-brothers spread across 16 years and three of my father’s acknowledged marriages (given Dad’s behavior in his later life, I have often wondered if there were others less known to my mom). Two of my brothers had other surnames due to having been adopted by other families during the Great Depression when my father could not support his first family. Such arrangements were not that uncommon in their generation. I first met one of my brothers and his foster parents only after I entered college.

I am fortunate to have an uncommon perspective on family histories. The men in my family were unusually long-lived and some of them were storytellers.

My paternal grandfather was born in the last year of the American Civil War. When he did not thrive under the parenting of his immediate family, he “borrowed” a family horse at age 16 and took off for what was still considered at the time to be “the West,” never to be heard from again. His elders died believing that he had been killed by wild Indians somewhere in Missouri. He had actually married a well-to-do young woman named Annie Fishback and built a lumber mill near Hannibal, Missouri.

Go figure.

My father’s father made a way for himself in the world, working at many things to put bread on his table and a roof over his family. I respect that resilience, and have tried to emulate it for most of my own 81 years. When he died in a traffic accident in 1941, Schuyler Arnten Lawhern owned a cabinet shop in Palo Alto, California. Probably the most complicated device he ever owned was a “wireless” radio.

I was once a pretty fair rough carpenter and cabinet maker myself, before I started writing in U.S. health care policy and practice.

With regards to the ongoing advance of high technology, my father’s life was not much better informed than Schuyler’s. The most complicated device Elmer Bradley Lawhern ever owned was a four-function calculator that he plugged into an electrical outlet on the wall. The HP scientific calculator from my freshman year at California Polytechnic College was a wonderment to him (and often to me).

My first real “computer” was a portable “Brick” calculator that boasted of 5K of resident memory. It was programmed in a form of the Basic computer language of the mid-1980s. That little Brick did orbital calculations that cost 100 times as much in programs created for more sophisticated IBM mainframe computers of the time.

How ironic that forty years later during my next-older brother’s eulogy in 2022, the attendees needed to be gently reminded to turn off or silence their iPhones.

As Bob Dylan told us in 1964, “The times, they are a’changing.”

Richard A. Lawhern is a patient advocate.