These Are the Days of Miracle and Wonder...

[Paul Simon, for anyone who doesn't remember "The Boy in the Bubble" from the Graceland album]

I keep looking at my temporal perspective. I think one of the odd things about being of an age is that your time sense about the recency of events changes. Things that seem like they happened yesterday are a decade or two in the past: e.g., the Clinton Presidency, the first Gulf War, my own move from East to West Coasts.

As a child, something that was "ten years ago" that did not happen in my awareness felt like ancient history. I was born during WWII but have no memory of it. The bits and pieces of being four or five I retain include passing through Penn Station after the war when travelling with my mother, learning of the death of my first dog, and one very incredible snowfall that was "over my head" [head was very close to the ground then...]. The Penn Station memory is very vivid and I'm pretty sure was from 1945 or 1946. The old station was demolished in 1962 or 63 and I had never travelled through it after that post war trip.

What is there is a distinct picture of high ironwork, almost lacy and delicate, and a great expanse of glass letting in light to the open concourse. It's a picture I am glad I have in memory.

Things that people coming of age take for granted didn't exist for most of my life. Makes me aware how someone with a few years can show up as an "old fogey." Things significant in my memory effectively never existed for someone in their twenties. I was a guest panelist for a group of students and mentioned a company I had worked for, one that had been the second biggest in its industry and one point in the Fortune 100 and 8th on the BusinessWeek market capitalization list, and I was met with blank stares. No one even knew the name of it. It was a hard shock about something I experienced as the best decade in my career.

Well, I'm not going to stop remembering, even if I risk being the irrelevant "old fogey." A lot of it is worth remembering. I wish more people did. Maybe we wouldn't keep making the same stupid mistakes over and over again.