How Far Back?

When I was a child, I often heard Mom relate my Dad’s first impression of Belize as like going 25 years into the past. As an adult, I heard that it was like going 50 years into the past. In a letter that Mom wrote to a young relative in 2005, it was like going 75 years into the past.

At first this inflation just amused me, like the angler’s story of a fish that grows with every retelling. However, I gradually realized that Mom wasn’t exaggerating or even changing her story. In all cases, she was trying to communicate that Belize reminded Dad of the U.S. in the late 1920’s or early 1930’s. I suppose that if she’d stuck with 25 years, a 20-year old reading her letter in 2005 might have imagined a world like the 1980’s.

Although Mom’s latest written account of this episode specifies “seventy-five” years, I used “twenty-five” instead because I believe that’s closer to what Dad said in 1954.