How great it would be to teach a single subject—even a single textbook! Year after year! Just run through the material 5 times in a day. It makes me shake my head when I look back at my Art class and that Physics of Chess period. Just give a 10-minute spiel before sitting back down in your rolling chair. Or in some cases like my Geography class, never getting up...come to think of it, no spiel either!

This is how I started out this post. I am writing in the evening, last night from your perspective. There's something about the falling rain that makes me retrospective...nostalgic...miss those who are out of my life. I see the old places...I think of the laughter. "Those goodbyes were not supposed to be the last ones..."

There was a time in my life when I did not gaze so much to the past. It was the FUTURE, "Yes, the world you want today, tomorrow! TECH, TECH, TECH!" I remember laying out beneath the Arizona summer of 2005, reading The Road Ahead, a book written a decade earlier by Bill Gates. Now nearly twenty years away from that moment in the Sun, has the world really changed?

Have we ever changed?

There are always new gadgets to do the things we already did. There are different circumstances and contexts. But, I'm still me. Even approaching 46. It makes it hard, the people who are out of my life. Dead, somewhere else, or just simply gone. "I'm still me...I'm still the guy they knew when I mattered."

So, I look back at me. "That younger version doesn't know, does he? Should I tell him? No? Let him smile..."

And just let (him) cry if the tears fall down like rain
Let (him) sing if it eases all (his) pain

-Hootie & the Blowfish