Lucid Living in anticlimatic

“You can time travel to the past anytime you want, but you’ll be alone when you get there.”

Saw this written somewhere.
Been confounding me for weeks.

It coincided with a run-in with a historical photo presentation that I found particularly captivating. I am obsessed with local history, and have a very decent collection of photos and information regarding it. The era between the 1940s and the late 1990s is something of a void in my collection, though. I have much from the boom times in the late 1800s and early 1900s, up to about WW2, but nothing much to bridge the gap between the world of 80 years ago, and the world I remember from 40 years ago.

My memory has served as my only database for imagery of the area from 1985 to 2000 or so, and a number of the photos in this new presentation I ran into validated and captured a number of those memories.

Furthermore, it presented entirely new vistas that directly bridged places I remember intimately with places long gone from much older records. Businesses I patronized when I was a teenager that had existed many years before I was born, and were nearing their end when I found them. In my memory these places had dated carpet and an older, musty smell to them. But here in this photo, they were vibrant and new- surrounded by much older businesses that were completely foreign to me, many of them looking like THEY were nearing their end.

One photo was particularly jarring to me. I think it was from the early 60s. A color photo taken from the middle of one of the main intersections downtown- one I know well, and recognized. I could see a store I remember being old and dated when I was a kid- “The Circus Shop,” clothing for children. It was vibrant. Across the street, a building I only remember as a modern 80s bank, was a crumbling white restaurant with a giant gaudy name written in decorative cursive down the side of it.

Crossing the street in front of it, and here is where it gets troubling, is a man and a young girl. The man is holding her hand as they cross, and his head is blurred. Only his head, as it is obvious he turned as they began to cross to look down and make sure she was making it.

That man is long gone now. That little girl is an old lady, if she’s that. But here he is, crossing the inttersection in the middle of the afternoon. Day off from work to go shopping with his daughter.

…but you’ll be alone when you get there.”

That entire world is long gone now, except for the skeleton of the area in which it occurred. What is the point of time travel if everyone in the past is long gone? It’s the people that matter. It’s the people that nostalgia yearns for.

In even the same small place, there are worlds stacked upon worlds, across times. How wild it makes me feel. As though, for the first time, I realize that I am a part of this brief world for a brief time.

Like a lucid dream, but awake.

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