You can’t shake ’em. Sometimes, it seems like everything belongs to the past. Recedes into sepia. And you begin to count how many people who shaped you have disappeared. How do you go forward? What should you do with the time ahead? Should you move on or cling and cherish? Can you do both? Living in the present with a head full of shadows, as though cast by drifting smoke.

I think of my parents’ generation who lived through that godawful war, so much…unbelievable…loss, yet they carried on. That sadness though, it clung to the plastic and pastel and finned cars and sweet music. Like the black line thrown by a flashbulb, just a fraction behind, and somewhere in the eyes of old photographs lies a hidden darkness.

It takes a lifetime to recognize it. And then–ha! surprise!–it’s too late to say: I understand. I get it.

And you wouldn’t anyway. You’d just know. Because that’s the way they got through it. You’d just sit quietly, joke, talk about the weather.

There’ll be blue birds over
The white cliffs of Dover
Tomorrow, just you wait and see