That's the way it was, is, and will be

When there was all the talk about Michael Jackson I kind of tuned out a bit because I was not generationally engaged. But with the passing of Walter Cronkite I was walking along the path to past memories.

• I like Ike
• Vietnam
• Civil Rights and Martin Luther King
• We choose to go the moon
• We travel to where no man (or woman) has gone before
• The Kennedy Years

Memory after memory flooded over me and through me. I think what I liked most about the news when I was growing up is that it was about reporting and not watching the smackdown pundits. I think what I like about the communication of today is that anyone with a computer and internet access can find a place to express one's opinion. That can lead to information overload but it can also lead to an exacerbation of critical mass which leads us out of entropy into important global paradigm shifts.

Like Momma said: "If you live long enough you can see everything and anything." I am rather awed by how far we have come since she was born in 1906 (10 years before Uncle Walter) but I am more awed by how far we will come in another hundred or two hundred years if we don't blow ourselves up or we avoid a meteor or if scientist and thinkers discover how to cool the earth by sucking up the cold water of the ocean to the surface and changing climate by directed and scientific intent... Wonder if they will mess it up? Wouldn't it be fun to see what the outcome would be.

I am remembering the stories of Mammy Helen Williams who gave birth to Grandma Nora Ford 1902 telling me about the first time she looked up from the Kentucky mountains and saw her first airplane. I also remember her telling me about smoking "wacky tobacky" and today Californians are trying to legalize and tax pot to save their economy.

I think I have reached a good time in my life where I can look backwards, forwards, inwards and sometimes just sit and be in the moment as I watch a cardinal land on a tree outside my window with a background of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

As Rita from New Orleans used to always say "It's all good."

I have always been delighted atthe prospect of a new day,a fresh try,one more start,with perhaps a bit of magicwaiting somewhere behind the morning.~ J. B. Priestly