The future of the past

(Originally posted to my AOL journal Monday, June 13th at 2:01pm)

Hi there, and welcome to my journal. If you are new here, please scroll down and read the previous post for your "official" welcome. I've gotten some nice e-mails from you and I appreciate your kindness about this journal. It's a little out of my usual self to write something like this, and I am encouraged by your interest.

Today when I look at the world I think of the past. I saw Star Wars Episode III again over the weekend, and it got me thinking about my younger days. My dad and I tried to see the original Star Wars in 1977 when I was only 5, and I remember being sad because we couldn't get in. We tried to see it at a drive-in as a family, and I think I fell asleep not too long after it began. When George Lucas re-released the movies with new scenes and graphics in the late 90s, my dad and I finally got a chance to see it on the Big Screen together. It was a very cool moment.So, it got me thinking about my life up until now. I find it a bit weird that all the things I've experienced in my life, both good and bad, internal and external, over the last 33 years, will someday be simply and neatly categorized by our child as things that "happened before I was born." The Star Wars saga has been completed before Baby Kolchuk was born! U2 will be one of those old bands that Daddy still listens to, and is just so out of touch with today's music. Baby Kolchuk will never remember two tall buildings reaching into the sky above New York City. There are so many other things, but I'll spare you the rest. You get the idea. Back to Star Wars, it feels like I am living the Prequel of my child's life.

It's a very surreal thing to feel, and it has really changed my perspective on many things. There's a new level of importance to these things now, and I don't know if I can accurately describe it here. I just know that all those things I felt as a child about my parents and the past, are now coming back around to complete a circle I'm guessing every parent experiences. Their life "before I was born" has new meaning now...it has become something that really happened, and it's so much more than just something that "happened before I was born". It's all real and it all matters. It's both exciting and strange.

So, today, when I look at the world, I see my future child helping complete this circle, in which this 33 year-old boy just might become a man.