Looking back and forth

This summer when I turn fifty-five I will be closer to sixty than fifty, but it may be like turning thirty-five instead, because I heard sixty is the new forty; we’ll see. The future gets closer everyday, and although we still don’t have time machines, we do have flying cars and 3D printers are bringing us closer to having Star Trek-like replicators.  

Almost forty years ago, when my grandfather was eighty-nine, he asked me to imagine what life will be like when I reach his age. Although I believe I have a good imagination, it really is a stretch for me to say that in the year 2049 we will do this or have that. But still I can dream and desire.  

Of course, I wish for health and happiness for my children, grandchildren, siblings and friends – but everybody does that. So my wish list is much broader and has the good of most (if not all) in mind.

In the future I still hope we have trains that blow their horns and make us think of places far away. Trains carrying freight and dreams on their rails tie us together in a way airplanes can’t.

I am increasingly dissatisfied with commercial air travel, so I think having the ability to fly like Peter Pan would be fun and useful; a little pixie dust and straight on til morning. I have heard about those who have tried to conjure their own version of the magic dust in garages and abandoned sheds and found it wanting and unsatisfying. Plus it’s illegal, so never mind about that pipe dream; it’s best to keep your feet on the ground anyway.

Perhaps we could stop trying to control the weather. In the seventies we feared the coming ice age, then we overreacted and heated up the planet; now we find ourselves in a deep freeze again.  Well, at least it gives us something to talk about.

In addition to all of life’s mysteries, I hope we keep looking for the Loch Ness monster and Big Foot or the Abominable Snowman, as he is known in his winter retreat (Yeti, to the locals). But I hope they remain ever elusive, for just as joy is found in the journey and not the destination, the adventure lies in the looking and not the finding.

I hope we will still have books – actual tangible books with real paper pages. I think these may be the real time machines. They are capable of propelling a person forward to a place not yet here or pulling them back to a simpler time.

I live in a farm house that was built in the late 1800’s; about the time my grandfather was born. Grandpa talked to me about his life on a farm when he was a boy; soon I will share those stories from another century with my grandson who may pass them on to his someday.

Thirty-five years from now I will be almost ninety (the new seventy), the age my grandfather was when he sat with me and discussed the past, present and future. At that time I was sixteen, an in-between age not shared by those younger or older.

My dream for the not too distant future is that all human life will be valued from the very young to the very old; especially the middle-aged as we seem to be confused as to how old we really are.