CHASING DOWN THE MUSE:Time keeps on turning ...

“One should ? never stop going on adventures ? destiny (is) the course or pattern of your life as it spontaneously takes shape ? wisdom will suffice to guide you.”

Dog days and memories. The air so heavy and hot. Wind moving through fronds of tall palms. Heavy surf lashing the coastline as beachgoers linger into the evening hours even as new arrivals straggle onto the sand.

A young couple straddles a motorcycle and pulls away from the curb as I watch. The juxtaposition of all the elements comes together, and I am transported to an earlier time ? a time that seems easier now, but, looking back, did it then? Is it the mere idea of a time of life when one jumped on the back of a motorcycle just to move, to somehow combat the inertia that was setting in with the heavy summer heat?

Wisdom says to look at the past, yet not linger there nor try to return. That couple on the motorcycle took me back to earlier times in Laguna and beyond, to Mystic Arts World and painted VW vans and bra-less loose, flowing dresses and wind in the hair and the greatest fear in those moments...? What was it? Not of terror. Not of being blown out of the sky.

Did being raised in an era of “duck and cover” under our desks give us some sense of control? Or did it bring fear into our hearts and heads, just as images flashed on our TV screens do today? Was life really all that different then?

There is an e-mail piece circulating that reminds us that young people starting college in the fall have had no experience of what many of us take for granted everyone knows. They were most of them born in 1988. That in itself is shock enough, right?

The further listing of facts ? like they are too young to remember the space shuttle blowing up or that their lifetime has always included an awareness of AIDS, the CD was introduced the year they were born, and that Jay Leno has always been on the Tonight Show ? gives one pause.

These young people ? so soon to be the adults who will be our hope for the future ? know nothing of Mork or, worse still, Howdy Doody and Buffalo Bob. Do they even have a clue how to use a typewriter? (No, it isn’t just a keyboard.) Have they ever walked across the room to change a channel on TV or listened to Inner Sanctum on the radio or heard the Sunday “funnies” read aloud?

Do these young people know about the Great Depression here in the United States that so influenced the lives of many of their great-grandparents? Kent State, “Hanoi Jane,” Sh-Boom, drive-in movies, carhops, the opening of Disneyland?. What do they know of these?

And what does it matter? The differences of experience aside, there are no real differences. In our lives we will all know or have known terror and hope, joy and sadness, energy and inertia. In the end, the differences don’t really matter as much as the sharing of them. There will always be new exploration, new learning, new mysteries to solve, new people and new relationships to forge.

The memories of some past moments conjure future possibilities and do battle with the inertia arising from the heat and humidity of these dog days of summer. And for those of us “older folks” too often weighed down by care and worry even more than the heat, we can always ? at least figuratively ? hop on that motorcycle, young and in love, wind in our faces, with no concern about things over which we have no control, and ride on.

This is life.