The More Things Change...by Susan Van Kirk

 

It is certainly true that “we live in interesting times.” I often wonder if our current lives are surrounded by more violence than other times, or if the news is just superb at reporting seriously ugly, depressing stories. I also muse about how events from the news of our earlier lives affect our current time. When I look back at my Endurance Mysteries, I realize several have a major plot connection involving the past affecting the present day. 

Those points were on my mind as I began researching my fifth Endurance mystery. Jeff Maitlin and Grace Kimball, my main characters, are now living in 2015. However, a totally unexpected event will take Grace back—at least in her memory—to her earlier life in 1981 when she was a young, married woman with small children. Since I’ll be creating Grace’s memories from her earlier life, I decided to check out what was happening in 1981. At that time in my life I was married, teaching high school English, and raising three children ages 9, 5, and 3. It’s a wonder I have any memory of the events of that year whatsoever.

I began researching 1981. Boy, was I wrong. Violent, violent. And with so many events that happened in 1981, we can look in the rearview mirror and realize what they’ve led to today. Time changes, but often connects, everything.

Plane crashes, bombings, murders, serial killers, assassinations, fire fatalities, bank robberies, train wrecks, and nuclear tests—all of those and more happened in 1981. Like Grace, I was raising small children, so the evening news wasn’t even turned on. But I’d like to think I had some idea of what was happening in the world. Besides the violence, as I leafed through the events of 1981, I often thought, “Boy, if we’d only known then what we know now.” Here are only a few of the many, many events that caught my eye as I researched.

Important world figures, as always, were part of that time. Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as our 40^th president, and two months later he was shot and wounded. Prince Charles announced his engagement to Lady Diana Spencer, and they married in July. (It seemed like a Cinderella story at the time, didn’t it?) Muhammad Ali fought his last fight and lost against Trevor Berbick.

In the world of music, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison recorded a tribute to John Lennon, who had been murdered the previous December. MTV launched, bringing merriment and mayhem into our lives. Simon and Garfunkel reunited for their Central Park concert in New York City. (Love that album.)

Some interesting, unusual, often happy events occurred in the year 1981. 

First class postage stamps in 
the US rose from fifteen cents to eighteen cents. (It’s about to go up to seventy cents this year.) The US debt topped $1 trillion for the first time. (As I type this, it’s up to $34.5 trillion and rising.) Elizabeth Jordan Carr was the first American test-tube baby born in the world. She was hailed as a miracle. (Currently, IVF is no longer an unusual procedure.) A puzzling story in that year was a mysterious illness that would later be called AIDS. That epidemic officially began when five homosexual men in Los Angeles were diagnosed with a strange, new pneumonia.

So many events beyond these happened in 1981, and I will do more digging and decide which ones might be part of Grace Kimball’s memories from her life with her first husband, Roger. (Shortly after that year, Roger died, leaving Grace a widow until Jeff Maitlin came into her life.)

A book series allows a writer to make these connections between the past and present, just as these events reminded me of current day topics that are still with us even though many of them began in 1981. History has always fascinated me, and researching times for mystery novels is fun, not work.  Jeff and Grace are now happily the proprietors of a bed and breakfast. But, as always, the past will catch up with the present in the next Endurance Mystery.