Things I miss

I grew up on earth. That seems a hundred years ago, now, since coming to La-A.

This is my home, and I love it here. I enjoy my gig and I am surrounded by fun things and good friends.

Still.

I read og's comment at Roberta's place, and it made me think of a time, long ago, when I held my Father's hand and stepped up to the cab of a steam locomotive. We spoke to the engineer and watched the fireman pour the coals in. In a time before litigiousness the engineer picked me up and put me in the seat, and let me pull back the big handle and shift the loco down the tracks. It was a thrill beyond compare, and a memory that will never leave me. I loved that spot, and went as often as I could, even spending a summer there as a "guide" before heading off to college. The definitive museum of the American Industrial Revolution. Steampunk heaven.

You can look at the machinery and see the change in the way people thought, and see the way people felt about the magic of the machinery.

I miss being able to walk among the locos and run my hand along the decades old paint. I miss being able to stand in Bucky Fuller's Dymaxion Home. I miss standing in Edison's lab and being amazed by the mixture of chemistry and physics and biology there.

I don't want to rescramble my brains to see it again, at least not yet. Maybe sometime towards the end of my life I will do so, so I can once more walk among the history of my species and marvel at how far we've come, if the place is still there when I arrive at that age.