I was at a store on Sunday when a fellow I know there told me he was retiring. I was stunned. He noted that he'd worked there eighteen years. My wife remembered he'd worked at a predecessor store we went to before that.
He noted the time had passed by rapidly.
Last Friday, when I left the office, a man older than me was helping his father into the building. His father was wearing a baseball cap, noting that he was a World War Two veteran. I was actually surprised, as there are so few left.
On Sunday night, I typed out my counterfactual on what it would have been like to graduate from high school in 1941, when I in fact graduated in 1981. In that, I noted that men my age now were in that class of 1941. I don't feel that old, and I guess in 1981 they weren't that old. 1981 doesn't seem that long ago to me.
Tempus fugit. But it's okay, really.
Somehow, those close to me in my past who have gone ahead seem closer now than ever.
