Where was I again?

I was a great fan of the TV series "Doogie Howser, MD" staring the then teenaged Neil Patrick Harris. I especially liked when, at the ending of the show, Doogie would type into his computer some message about what he had learned during his day. It was quite similar to writing in a diary.

I used to have diaries when I was young. I usually got one for Christmas, but I seldom wrote anything past January 4 or 5. And over the years the nearly blank books just faded away. But Doogie was faithful about his daily diary duty. Of course he had a computer. Something I lacked when I was his age; although I'm not sure that would have had any influence on my diary discipline.

Today things are different. Based on the staggering number of the e-mails, text messages and digital photos sent and/or received each and every second of every day I would hope that people are building up a repository of memories to be passed on to future generations or at least saved to jillion byte memory sticks to be looked at in the future's equivalent of a retirement home.

Where are my notes?

There are a bunch of experiences that I've had over the years that I now wish I had either photos of or notes on or both. For example: When I was in the military I once took a train from San Francisco to Cleveland. Today a cross-country train ride is a rarity. A few photos of the landscapes we passed through would be something nice to have. Another time I was kind of stranded in Dayton, Ohio, and I had to take a Greyhound bus to northern Texas. I probably traveled along the now famous Route 66 without knowing that some day it would become fabled. And back in those days there weren't facilities or air conditioning on buses. We'd stop at some large terminal or at one of those dessert-like diners seen in classic movies. As I recall it took around two days to make the trip. And as I also recall a bus rider got to meet a lot of interesting fellow travelers. But who can remember them?

More than one way to get there

Another now fading mode of transportation was hitchhiking; that's where a traveler would stand on the side of a road, made a kind of fist with the thumb sticking out and sort of waved the thumb-fist in the direction he wanted to go until someone stopped and invited him into their car or truck. This was a favored way of travel way back then, by cash-strapped servicemen.

If I possessed a texting machine at the time I could have sent my computer a message explaining what I and a buddy of mine was doing in the dark of night hitchhiking to Dallas, Texas. All I remember is being dropped off around 3 a.m. at a "Y" in the road by a semi driver who was taking the left route and telling us that we wanted the right one. Let me tell you it was a dark and moonless night. We just stood there wondering what we had gotten ourselves into when we saw headlights approaching from the way we had come. It was a farmer in a rattley old pick-up truck.

"You fellows want a ride?" he asked. "I can take you as far as Dallas." He never bothered to ask what we were doing out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. People were more trusting back then. As it turned out we had to share the back of his truck with a flock of sheep he was taking to the farmer's market. To this day I have no idea what I was doing hitching a ride to Dallas or how we smelled when we got there.

My hard drive crashed

As we look 50 years into the future, what will your memories be? Will you still have that memory stick or will it have been washed away by a flood caused by global warming? Will your computer diary be available or lost because your hard drive crashed? Or did a virus erase the content of your Picasa photo files the day before you intended to back them up? Or did your girl/boyfriend deliberately squish your memory devices under the wheels of the car because you were insensitive to their needs?

Who knows what the future holds? I sure don't. I'm still trying to sort out what happened in the past.