2000-01-31 - 01:20:55

THE WONDERING JEW

Soliloquy

As the new permeates the old and eventually the old is turned around and made new, then the structure of your home town changes so radically that you feel like a stranger in a very strange land.

Once familiar streets have become strange, having strange buildings with occupants doing strange things. the street signs still read the same and in are in the same order as in your childhood. But, but, but, there are these skyscrapers towering over the streets, where once the tallest building was a bell tower, a replica of a famous italian structure, further east up town was a basilica with spires straining toward the sky. From almost any part of town those two things could be seen. Now they are dwarfed and puny compared to the masoleums of business, the crypts of corporate america.

I still cannot travel in time, but I ache for the things that were good and pure in the time of my childhood. Some of the new structures now have been razed to make room for something newer, not necessarily better, just newer.

It is easy for this old man to understand now, what he used to hear the gaffers in the park say, "Bejaysus the world is going to the dogs, but I don't think the dogs will have it now."

Change comes hard to most humans and comes harder to me as time passes us by. Our lives are intimately connected to our children, their children and their children's children. We are close enough to them to recognize the maturing of babies into toddlers etc., etc.

I am not sure if this a rant or a soliloquy, I guess it is the latter because a rant is loud and nasty.

Time is not kind, but it elapses and brings about changes. Many of the changes are vastly better, the new medications and the treatment of diseases and the orthopedic procedures are marvels of progress, for example. But on the other hand it seems we are sinking into a morass of mediocrity and trinkets.

Still the giggling, wiggling calls of children skipping on their way to somewhere fun still makes life wonderful.

Ol' rockin' chair's got me, good night -- end of Soliloquy . . . . . . .

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