Time Traveling Grasshopper

It's funny how a little thing can remind you of the past. For instance, the small impact of a startled grasshopper upon my leg while walking to my car. It was such a tiny thing, the grasshopper. Tiny in size, but as it turns out a powerful agent of time travel. It was just this case that brought about my recent excursion to a time devoid of Internet and social media. Like a lightning bolt to the DeLorean, I’m Marty being hurtled through time to a sunny place in the past.  To a time when things were simpler, a time when the largest care I had was what to feed the grasshopper now resting in the glass jar on the table in front of me. A grasshopper I caught and proudly displayed both to my father's amusement and my mother's disgust.

It was a time where the pressure to attain more wealth than your neighbor was less important than fixing the chain on a child’s bicycle, even if it was your neighbors child. A time wherein a man knew his neighbor’s, not just those next door but knew the ones at the end of the street as well. It was a good time to grow up; we were kings of our world, which extended to 8^th street, but no further because that was simply off limits. We had no idea what the term Cold War or terrorism truly meant, though we often heard that the soviets were “evil commie bastards”.

I find the further removed from that simple time I reach the more I find myself missing those days prior to cell phones, internet and twitter. Perhaps I’m like so many others in their early adult life, finding that time is a merciless monster swallowing us bit by tiny bit until I fear nothing will be left of what we once dreamt we could one day be.

Luckily for me a grasshopper came my way.