Why are some evenings so given over to reflection? I sit here at the computer and I read poetry, some bringing me back to so many things past. And I ponder on the years and wonder where they all went. "Yesterday, when I was young," an old song drifts thru my mind and I have to stop whatever I am reading or doing, and I want to know when being young went away? Yesterday? It seems like it was just a day old, not years old. I can still see me when I was a young and hell-raisin' kid. I can close my eyes and see myself falling in love right out of high school, and vowing to never love another as long as I lived. Looking back, I fell in love a lot of times after that, but that one stayed with me all these years. He married, had children, watched them grow, and give him grand and great grandchildren. He was a great catch, too bad I didn't catch him way back then. But, I never, ever forgot that first love.

I remember so many good times and good friends that I had when I lived in Texas. I drove back down there about twenty years later, and I went to all the old places I used to go, and I looked for me. How sad a feeling when I couldn't find me. One can never go back and find their youth. The years cover them up and hide them forever. Only memories of those great times remain. It is the one thing that we hold onto with the ferocity of a mother and her cubs. But, as the cubs grow older, so do our memories, and our hold on them is not as tight, and we fight to keep from letting them go as they fade around the edges and grow dim.

I'll go back to reading poetry and hopefully, I can keep my mind concentrated on them, but I doubt it. Those wonderful old memories just wiggle their way back in and I am again, lost in times past.