Time and Eternity Part 1

"Time is what keeps everything from happening at once!" I used to really love science fiction and my favorite stories involved time travel. It is still fascinating to imagine what the world I live in was like a century ago, or longer. I had an opportunity a number of years ago to go through the Cannon Falls Beacon archives while helping Valerie do a project for school. We went down into the basement of the Beacon office where they were stored, laid out flat in piles. I love the smell of old books, old newspapers. I read several sequential weeks, and the effect on me was as if I were suddenly a stranger in town. The mayor, the preachers, the school bond issue, the scandals, the births and deaths, all started to hang together as I got a picture of a community of people who all knew each other and had an awareness of a world around them that I could see is lost to us now. "The Great War" (was that the War to end all Wars?) wasn't even on the radar yet. They still referenced the Civil War as a commonly known event. Those people considered my town theirs. And it was. Where are they now? Where will I be in a century? When I start to think about times gone by, people no longer around, and the persistant, relentless, forward only progression we are currently trapped in, I get sad. And I would love to go back and visit "the good old days" which at the time didn't seem all that great. My neighbor down the road wrote a book a few years ago, (Natalie Thomas, but which book?) In it, a character through some technological wonder, had an opportunity to go back to a day of his choosing so he could talk once more to his father. To his total frustration though, his 12 year old self, just ignored his dad, focusing on whatever it is a 12 year old thinks is important at the moment. The whole opportunity was wasted, again! I'll bet that's what I'd do. Not give that person a hug or tell them I loved them, but roll my eyes and ask them to please pick up their shoes. And then rush off to do whatever my old self thinks is important. That is a lesson I hope my current self figures out--people, not things. Eternity trumps schedule.