Past Life

I was just listening, in the background, to an interview I conducted on April 12, 2004. I hadn't intended to do so, but realized that I should probably monitor the conversion process from tape to AIFF. It was an unsettling experience. On the one hand, I sound more or less the way I do now. On the other, almost everything that matters in my life has changed radically in the interim. And yet I am still here in Tucson, living in the same community that I described to my interviewee, who also spends much of his time in these parts. At times, I had the sense that I was hearing my own ghost, one who sounds like me, has my interests, yet has somehow managed to escape the hard realities of my current existence.