Past Tense

My younger brother stopped by to help me ring in another year as well as appreciating my role as a father to his nephew. It was a low-key celebration that featured one of our favorite activities: talking about the past. On the way out to his car, he was wondering aloud if it was a good thing to be more interested in the past than the present or future. I told him that I figured it was probably a measure of where we find ourselves currently. The present is awfully mundane, consisting primarily of prior commitments and regular chores. The future is becoming less fun to think about, ever since we got our driver's licenses and got drunk and got married. Looking forward isn't all that different from looking at the present.
But the past is a pretty good gig. It's like a big library, where you can select a volume at random and find all kinds of hidden treasure. For example, the two of us spent an hour or so last night going through each house in our old neighborhood, listing the inhabitants and the various curiosities that kept life so interesting on our street. What was the name of their dog? Tippy. The oldest daughter was Julie. The time we went Christmas caroling and we stopped at Mister Ransom's house, he slammed the door on us.
The perspective of years gives us plenty of room to laugh at the things that seemed so terribly serious at the time. We have grown up, but we have immediate access to our shared youth. It reminds us of the days when we used to ask our parents to tell us stories about the olden days. Those were the days we couldn't remember on our own, but are happy to add to the shelves in the library, and the ones that help round out our own stories. We're very lucky, having grown up in a family that revels in the past. In the midst of unfurling one particular tale, my son came wandering out to tell us goodnight, and upon hearing the thread of the story we had begun, he picked it up and finished it off all on his own. He has been around long enough to start hearing some of these stories for a second or third time, and he has begun to assimilate them himself. It makes me feel good about the future.