This evening, I fell into a time warp.

I was eleven years old, sitting on the patio with my parents and our cross-the-street neighbors from Sherwood Park. Our neighbors hadn't changed and suddenly, all the changing my parents have done in the past twenty-five years vanished, too. I was there, sitting on a plastic lawnchair in the fading heat of the early evening, hearing the conversations that had aged but didn't differ, feeling like I was someone else. When I say that everyone was exactly as I remembered, it was true, but now I picked up something new. I saw subtileties and nuances in relationships and personalties that were probably there in the past but went undetected by a child. I'm still reeling from the whole thing.

To say I was uncomfortable isn't true. I like my old neighbors. I always found them kind and caring. It was just something about their presence that caused the dynamics between us all to digress by at least twenty years. It was an enveloping field - as tactile as the atmosphere of a red-carpeted, old, wood-paneled library, with its smell of musty books and decades-old pipe smoke lingering in the 12 foot ceilings. The situation felt very surreal. Thinking about it now and how I felt makes me realize that I have some issues that I still have to deal with regarding my youth. I don't know if I want (right now) to deal with them, though.

We don't really change, do we? The world changes around us, older people die and younger people grow up to fill in the gaps which gives the illusion of change, but really, we are as we were made. Time just goes by and we learn more about the intricacies of each other.

Diplomacy is a tool most skillfully handled by the mature.

And for some reason, realizing all this makes me very melancholy tonight.