You Can Go Home Again, and Again...

You can go home again. But it's not the same home you left. As I get older, everything around me gets older, too. I've known this objectively, but my visits home make the point, tellingly.

Moscow is growing like mad with new houses, but the population stays pretty much the same (those households get smaller as the square footage gets larger). The Methodist Church Annex looks so dated now, sleepily seedy, and I remember it snazzy and shiny back in 1960 or so.

The University Library has a new front. The Classroom Center has been rebuilt. Downtown Moscow has some of the shops I knew as a kid, but many new restaurants and boutiques, a gym or two.

It's the same as I remember in 1974, only very different, recognizably the same and different. Progress decays to new progress. Shiny becomes dull, becomes burnished, becomes a whisper of something past and a harbinger of new progress and decay. Nothing ever stands still. Why am I puzzled?