I have to say that nothing looks the same as it did when we were younger. Most of the places we went to have all been closed and sadly, I am at an age when I realize the truth of mortality.
I thought about this while speaking with the owner of a pet store the other day. He used to have a television show on our local network.

His store looks the same, yet nothing is ever the same as it was.
The store owner reminded me that everything has a start and a finish. And I agree.
We all have our beginning, middle, and an end.

This is life.
However, I still have a center of youthfulness. I still have a place in my heart which I hope to keep pure.
This is where dreams come from. To me, this is the place where wonder exists and superheroes never die.

I remember the unofficial start of summer. I remember the trips out east and to the Hamptons and the nights when I slept in cars because I couldn’t get a place to stay or I didn’t have enough money to pay for a room.
I remember the beaches which were always beautiful. However, and in all fairness to the awkward stages in young adult life, I remember fears.
I remember the discomforts I had and the insecurities behind taking my shirt off because I was way too thin and way too small in comparison to the other friends in my group.

Everyone I knew went to the gym, not me though.
All of my friends were in shape. They all flexed and compared muscles. They talked about their reps or how much weight they put up. I remember the ones on steroids too, and they were huge. I mean absolutely huge.

It seems to me that we live in a world of gadgets and gizmos. Everything seems to be about technology, applications, smart phones, smart watches, face-times, and video evidence of literally everything we see around us. We have street cameras that detect our speeds—and trust me, I know all about this because I have speeding tickets that come in the mail and fines that need to be paid now.

We have moved far away from the days of beepers or pagers, and pay phones on the corners or at the stores down the block.
Hell, I had a rotary phone in my house . . .

I hear the questions about our past or the ones that ask, if you woke up and it was back in the 90’s, what would you do?
I love these questions and I love them for different reasons.
I’ve written journals about this before. Since I love the taste of nostalgia, and since I love the warmth and bitter sweetness that comes with remembering the old family gatherings, I figured, why not?
I enjoy looking back at the days when we were young and the kids in the neighborhood were still the kids from the neighborhood.
I think I’d like to go back to some of those times myself.

I know that I cannot rewrite history or change what happened. I know that not all things were so bad and not everything was so tragic.