The Past has Passed

I don’t have a Facebook account; but I am on LinkedIn and Twitter.  It seems to me that Facebook “opens the book” on privacy more than I’m ready to accept.  At least for now.  I do think it’s fascinating that never before could you connect with people in your long ago past like today.  This is especially true if you no longer live where you grew up.

Before the advent of this technology, people who lived in your childhood were dead, for all intents and purposes.  But you could resurrect them at anytime: They still live in your mind exactly as you knew them. The guys on the corner are still there, still seventeen years old, still smoking Lucky Strike cigarettes.  And the girls are still “orbiting” the corner and stopping to entice their boyfriends to go with them. And they never grew old like you.

There’s something sacred about those memories.  If you ride the time machine of technology, you run the risk of “sapping” the romance out of your childhood just to satisfy your curiosity.

But is it worth it? Do you really want to know the truth, a truth that will be neither glorious nor terrible and will show that they acquiesced, like you, to the forces that trampled our dreams and left us on the giant tracks of routine lives?

I don’t.