"Heartbeats...Drumbeats...Past and Future..."

Stephen Hawking has nothing on George Carlin.

Carlin once summed up the whole space/time continuum thing in a short burst of brilliance.

"There is", he said, "no such thing as the present...there is only future and past...it's the future, it's the future, here it comes, it's the future and...whoa...it's the past.."

Tick tock far exceeding the speed of light.

That concept made perfect sense the first time I heard it, so it was no wonder that I've always turned my head a little Forrest Gumpishly to the left whenever I hear people talk about "living in the now."

Yes, I know it's a philosophical perspective and not meant to be a literal life directive.

But, at it's intellectual core, if you buy what Carlin sells, then there is no now.

Only future and past.

But here's a plot twist.

The future often brings us face to face with the past.

This whole ice cream headache inducing train of thought came chugging down the tracks of my synapses today when the word November on my calendar conjured up some memories of the past.

Houston, Texas. A sixth grade classroom at Albert Sidney Johnston Junior High School. Twelve forty five PM, Central Standard Time. November 22.

1963.

And for what was the once and only time it ever happened to me in my educational history, the PA speaker above the blackboard at the front of the room was broadcasting not the usual fare of applicable school business announcements, calls for teachers and/or students to "report to" the principal's office or the daily group vocalization of the Pledge Of Allegiance..but, instead, the radio news that was usually only heard, in my 1963 world, from the dashboard of the family Ford wagon.

The newsman was using words like "gunfire","motorcade","head wound", "Dallas", "Parkland"....
...and "assassination".

The story ended, of course, with the end of the Kennedy presidency.

And I can't add a single revelation to an event that took place forty six years ago.

For my children, even for their children, the killing is a few paragraphs in a history textbook, a dry, emotionless documention of dates, places, facts, figures.

It is, to them, what the Lincoln assassination was to me when I was young.

The past. Nothing more.

And even though the youngers they can, with the technologies of You Tube, et al, experience the event visually, they cannot, given time and distance experience it viscerally.

Only those who lived it can feel it.

Or be moved, if only just for a fleeting moment, by the sound of the drums.

A sound from the past.

As we live out our futures.