"Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going." Tennesse Williams

I recently made the decision to look up some old friends. I thought it would be interesting to see how they were doing, what life had dealt them. What was I thinking. I can divide these people into two groups. The first group has done well, or at least okay. They got married, had kids, some got divorced, some got remarried. It was fun catching up but whatever ties that bound us together have long ago turned to vapor. Time changed things.

The second group falls under the WTF was I thinking category. A good example is a guy we will call Greg, because that’s really his name. In my friend hierarchy he was on the lower end. He was a smarmy condescending prick 20 years ago and he still is. After listening to him over the phone for a few minutes it dawned on me that I never really liked this person. But we ran in the same crowd, knew the same people, so we were friends by proxy. I also drank a lot back then and I was a bit of a prick myself, so we shared that common ground. I don’t drink anymore and I refuse to suffer fools, so I cut the call short and immediately stopped trying to look up people from the past.

Thomas Wolfe said "You can’t go home again" and truer words were never spoken. I think we reinvent the past sometimes. We romanticize the way things were. We want to hold on to our youth and have fond recollections of the way things were. The truth is people change. And more often than not they are better left confined to the time capsule of our memory. All of us to one degree or another are different people than we were 10 years ago, or last week for that matter. The places, people and things we once held in high regard change with time. More importantly we change, we move on and the past is better left alone.