It happened again. I got a strange phone call the other night, an old college girlfriend of mine called me up, I had started dating her on and off right after I got out of the service, and our relationship continued intermittently for the whole time we were in school, about 5 years. After graduation, we went our separate ways.

Kathy found my name on the internet, and even though it is a fairly common one, she was able to deduce from my personal and professional interests who I was and she called me at work. We talked at length, and exchanged a few emails over the next few days, (she lives far away) and brought each other up to date.

Comparing notes after over three decades, it was pretty clear that the persistence of memory was severely compromised for at least one of us. Each of us remembered incidents the other had forgotten, and there was some disagreement and flat out contradictions, not only in the details but in the timing and order of key events.

This has happened to me several times over the last few years; old friends who had dropped off the edge of the earth found me, or I them, and together we try and reconstruct our past with only limited success. I know, you can never go back. Which brings up another issue altogether: does there come a time for all of us when we need to go back and reassess the past, to try and make sense of what went before? When does the past take on a more vivid presence than the future?
Is this natural, or is it something to be resisted and overcome lest we become obsessed with our own mortality?

There are cusps in life, binary decisions, watersheds and discontinuities in the timelines. Does contemplating them lead to greater insights, to wisdom, or is it all a futile exercise, an impediment to our own personal journey? The future will always hold new possibilities, they must be sought out and realized before it is too late. And sometimes, the past can be a Pandora's box of ghosts and disappointments best forgotten.

Sometimes I envy the SDUDE, In his multiverse there is no time, there is no prelude or postscript, learning and forgetfulness are meaningless and everything happens at once.