Looking at photos

My hair is completely brown, as completely gray and white as it is now.

Lots of people in the photos are dead now, and I buried most of them.

I found a bunch of pictures of my installation as Rector of St. John's in Waterbury in 1989.

26 years ago now and a lifetime ago.

So many people in these pictures are dead now.

I suppose I'll be in pictures people look at after I'm dead, as well.

How odd. Caught in the moment, alive. Viewed decades later and dead.

And I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now (in spite of my gray/white hair).

If I could go back to that moment, knowing what I know now, being who I am now as opposed to then--Lordy, Lordy, what a difference I could make.

Time travel hasn't yet been invented. But if it were, I'd go back there and be a better priest and a better husband and better father and better man.

Too bad, it seems, that finding your 'better self' comes after the fact.

I am so much more "who I am" now than I was then.

Thus it is, I suppose.

And I admire my 26 years ago brown hair a bit too much.

That way is vanity, I suspect.

Humility may just be knowing you're smarter now than you were in the past and can't do a damn thing to convey that wisdom backwards to when you needed it.

Something like that, if that makes any sense at all.