Roswell Not So Long Ago

This doesn't have anything to do with turning 40. I noted at our High School reunion how i felt kinda sapped of energy afterwards and attributed it to the general awareness of the passage of time. Well i think that was it. We were at a Roswell Historical Society benefit the other night and this guy who lived in my neighborhood as a child was telling us all these stories about how in the early '70's he and his brother used to drive (in a VW bus they got for $50) west on Rriverside Road in Roswell, down the hill from us (which was not a road at all once it passed Eves road) along the river, way into what is now Horseshoe Bend (which back then was just some farmland where they held the Atlanta Steeplechase, now it's a fancy neighborhood) He's describing basically our backyard and i can see what he's describing like it is today, and visualize all the places he is talking about, and so aware that what they used to do is just impossible now. Why should that have such an effect? I wasn't even there.

I've also read these books about this very same land another hundred years earlier than that (July 1864), when some soldiers from Illinois were messing around down the hill from us, drinking, and dishonoring some women they had taken prisoner from the Roswell mill, crossing the river nearby, one of them drowning, or writing letters about how good the blackberries are along the river here (BTW they still are). For some reason these older stories don't yield the same "lost" feeling -- it's just the ones that are within our grasp that same to have the most effect.