As Time Goes By....

"Well I'm not the kind to live in the past, The years run too short and the days too fast, The things you lean on, are the things that don't last, Well it's just now and then, my line gets cast into these, Time passages There's something back here that you left behind, Oh, time passages, Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight..." Al Stewart, TIME PASSAGES

So, continuing with the theme of times gone by, remeberances of days past, etc., tonight my wife & I, who were married just a little over 16 months ago, went out to dinner with long-time friends of ours who were celebrating their 1-year wedding anniversary (we & another couple actually went to Las Vegas with them last year for their wedding--they were married in a civil ceremony with family & several close friends a few days before that)--it got me thinking how, as much as we all tend to say it about our lives these days, time really does seem to pass more & more quickly as we all get older; add to that the fact that I just turned 50 this past April, a few weeks after my own one-year wedding anniversary, & my wife did the same this past June, and you really feel like so much of your daily lives have all of a sudden sped by in what seems like one big blur; then you think of other events that have practically caught up to the present in a flash: for example, my niece/god-daughter will turn 8 next month & her sister will be 4 in October--I feel like I was just in the hospital seeing them for the 1st time after they were born only recently; this past May marked 12 years since my father passed & my mother turned 78 this past April--how did THAT all happen already?? Add to that a photo album my mother made me for my 50th & a similar one my wife's sister did for her 50th, all the old pics bringing back a flood of memories--being a life-long lover of music & a musician myself, always synching various songs & lyrics with any & all aspects of my life, I think of Chicago's song OLD DAYS ("Good times I'll remember...")--and I have become more & more nostalgic as the years go by (not to say I'm unique; I imagine we all do it as we get older)--I think that because the world we live in is so drastically different than any of us could have imagined at this point (technological advances; global economics; the ever-changing faces & state of everything from government, education, world powers, race relations, religion, etc.; and amazingly, the approaching 10th anniversary of 9/11), & as I alluded to in my last blog about the comfort & peace-of-mind, as it were, of re-living our youth simply by posting on a Facebook page about what we remember most about coming from a certain city or neighborhood, more & more, we all need that safety-net of a piece of our past that, for better or worse, keeps us sane & maybe for just a brief moment, gives us hope--and (here comes another song lyric to make my case--LOL), as Paul McCartney sang in SILLY LOVE SONGS: "What's wrong with that?" :)