Past Lives

It has been a strange day of living in my past. Kind of unintentionally.

I mean... I haven't been in a funk and wanting to relive some other time - which I totally admit happens from time to time - it just kind of happened of its own accord, today.

I reached into my closet this morning for a t-shirt. I wanted something with a graphic of some kind (because I can wear that kind of thing to work), and just pulled out the first shirt that I put my hand on. It's a really comfortable t-shirt from the 30th Birthday celebration for a store called Kitchen Bazaar from out in Maryland. I worked there in... umm... 1993, maybe? Maybe 1994? But I still have good friends from there, and good friends I met while working there - but who, themselves, did not work there.

At work, today, I was introduced to a new member of staff, and the topic came up that - having started at the company 4 years ago - I'm currently the 6th most senior member of the staff.

In the course of the day, I got a notice that a good friend of mine will be leaving his job at CenterStage Theater in Baltimore in the near future. This is a good friend of mine whom I hired to work under me in the Box Office many years ago - I worked there from 1996 until 2002. (He has, since, gone on to be a Box Office manager and then work in the Development office and do all sorts of cool things.) He's kind of my last solid connection to that theater. It's a weird feeling knowing that he's moving on and that I won't need to stop by the theater to see people on future visits to Baltimore.

Got home from work and had a SDSU alumni magazine (class of 1989!) in the mail. No biggie. I get those often enough - although it did seem a bit coincidental.

But then I opened an envelope from my parents to find that the note was written on a card which had the show artwork from a CenterStage production of the August Wilson play "Two Trains Running" on the front of it (which I recognized and was able to name even before looking at the back of the card, even though the show ran a couple of seasons before I started work there).

What else was in the envelope? A clipping from my hometown newspaper's "Way Back When" column where, from 24 years ago, there was a notice that I had just been awarded a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship to France (apparently one of 12 recipients from SDSU from 1968 until 1989, in case you were wondering).

I'm not sure what it all means, really.

Perhaps it's just all funky coincidence based in the fact that today was the birthday of Douglas Adams - the guy who wrote the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series of books.

Perhaps it's the universe's not-so-subtle way of reminding me where I've come from.

Perhaps it's a hint that I need to clear out my closet more frequently.

We may never know.