I ADDRESSED LAST WEEK’S COLUMN TO MY GRANDNIECE ADDY, who had celebrated her first birthday the previous Saturday, and mentioned that I hoped she would read it when she graduated from college (her mother told me she clipped it out of the paper and would show it to Addy on that date).

None of my ancestors, to my knowledge, wrote a letter like that for me to read on my first birthday, Sept. 30, 1963. I am a student of history, however, and for this column I thought I would write a “column to the future” from the imagined perspective of someone on that now-long-ago date.

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HELLO, MATT. I’M WRITING THIS TO YOU FROM THE MISTS OF HISTORY, on Sept. 30, 1963, to be read in the far-away year of 2015. I was at your first birthday party today, and it is amazing how you have grown in your first year.
Your parents and friends are working to build a world that is better than the one they found. How did we do?

About a month and a half ago, I sat in the thick heat of an August day in Washington, dangled my shoeless feet in the reflecting pool on the National Mall, and listened to Dr. Martin Luther King describe the dream he had for America. He is such an inspiring young man! I was so moved by his words that I clipped a transcript out of the newspaper and saved it. Dr. King said:

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

What have we done to make that dream a reality? There is talk of putting a couple of bills to Congress within a year or two, to guarantee civil and voting rights for the “sons of former slave owners” that Dr. King mentioned — did they pass? I am not optimistic; such bills have been floated before, only to fail in the face of filibuster by Southern senators. My hope is that our young President Kennedy will be able to apply that famous charm of his to sway some stubborn Southerners, and finally get those rights guaranteed to our fellow citizens.

As I write this, there is an iron curtain across Europe, with the Soviets on one side and the Allies on the other. Just a couple weeks after you were born, we had some moments during the Cuban Missile Crisis where it looked like there would be nuclear war between the two sides, and I wondered whether you would see your first birthday. Things have calmed down in the last few months, but a lot of my friends still expect a nuclear war within our lifetimes between the Warsaw Pact countries and NATO.

Our generation has seen far too much of war. One thing everyone agreed on at the end of the big one, World War II, was that we must do everything we can to prevent another war like that from devastating continents and robbing nations of their young and vital men. I surely hope you are reading this with gratitude rather than disappointment.

On a smaller scale, there have been fears of an escalating war in Southeast Asia. President Kennedy has been sending military advisers to the country there that most of my friends can’t remember the name of — Vietnam, is it? — but has said that ultimately it is “their war.” I hope President Kennedy wins that debate. A lot of hawks are pressuring the president to intervene, but I’ve never heard a clear reason why.

On a happier note, we seem to be making progress in taking our first steps into outer space. John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth about a year ago, and President Kennedy has committed us to go to the moon by the end of this decade. I have a feeling we will meet that deadline, and I wonder what will happen after that. There is talk of building a base on the moon once we’re there, and then on to Mars by the early 1980s. We have the knowhow to reach those goals — I hope President Kennedy is doing his part to realize his vision in those later years.

Finally, Matt, I hope you think about the world you will be handing to your descendants, and will do your best to hand them a world that is better than the one you found.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand. He works for a tech start-up in San Francisco.

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