Days and years ago

Funny how time passes and you forget.

Not just things and places and people, but yourself.

I know in my mind that I'm not the young man in this picture anymore. Oh, he's there, somewhere, inside the older, grayer, heavier man sitting down in the basement at the computer listening to his wife and little boy baking, half an ear cocked for the sound of a little girl waking from her nap...
But the problem is that I don't feel all that different from that slim younger guy. The mirror tells me different but it's hard not to think that the mirror is lying and not my own mind.

Among the things I forget is how different things were twenty years ago. Twenty! My God...it was twenty years ago this coming fall that my ex and I flew across the Atlantic for our honeymoon. Ohmilord, were we kids...

We had NO money - put the whole trip on credit cards we spent the next year paying off. Lived cheap and travelled light - and depended on my parents, then living in Dusseldorf, to help by putting us up for free during our time in Germany. (That's why my daddy is in the picture, C!)
It was a good time, a young time and new for us, sunny and hopeful things that we were. We loved the tea shops of London, ancient Roman ruins and shiny new Dutch hotels (where the locals took their pets on holiday - we kept the "Hondseveekend" brochure from the hotel at Kirkduun for a long time). Delft and the Mosel valley in autumn and a long walk in the "stadtwald" marvelling at the the pin-neatness of German forests...
It was a long time ago and that journey is over and done. I'm on a different road now, travelling another way. But the old trip was as full of happiness as grief in its time, and I'm not sorry we took it.