Back to the Future

Once in a great while you hear about married couples who met in high school. The other day my wife showed me a picture of her from when she was 18, and it made me wonder how we would have reacted to each other at that age. I guess I'm sort of glad it would be another 8 years after this shot was taken, before I met her. Believe me, I needed every spare moment of it, to get my act together. There's also this greater awareness of the sacred nature of the early years after you get a few decades away. When you ponder the amount of story that's packed into every life and every family, and then realize there's 6.5 billion of us, plus everyone who went before, it really is staggering. It's one of the great imbalances of life on earth. Each person could generate vast libraries full of anecdotes and observations, yet people come and go and most of it just dissipates. I wonder if they'll ever be a great way to store our memories? Pictures are okay, but there's a lot of mystery in a picture. Sure, it's worth a thousand words, but each life could generate a trillion words everyday.