Time travel

I have always been very much aware of time. Not that I am a good manager of time--that is a different matter.

This awareness is so much a part of my life that I chose this tagline: "traveling through time at the usual rate of one second per second," hoping for something pithy, memorable, and evocative.

Looking back at the past, and looking forward to the future, are both favorite passtimes. And I mean "passtime" in the more literal sense of something to do while time passes; for meanwhile, the world continues to move forward at the usual rate, etc.

There is nothing like a photo to plunge me into a state of nostalgia and reflection.



Pictured are four of my favorite people. I think I was the photographer. I was certainly present when the photo was taken. That was a wonderful moment that was captured; one of many that day, visiting my parents in Canada.

All of the people in the photo are gone now. My children's grandparents gone the way of all the world: dead and buried, but not forgotten. The children are still living, so they are not gone in the same sense of the word.

But the children are now adults. Of course, I love them just as much now as I did then.

It is them as they were then that I miss. Gone is the naiveté, the innocence, the simple delight in being alive. That moment, that day, those innocents, are gone forever.

And that is one of the consequences of traveling through time--not that I have any choice--at the usual rate of one second per second.