There are places that I have visited, places where forbears lived, where I find myself searching for shadows conjured by memory or by family lore. Did Grandpa Jordan walk this street? They say he walked everywhere, never took to cars, and people didn’t get around by mule and buggy by the time he was an old man in Burlington, NJ.

Now, when I walk the campus where I have worked the last 30 years, I am my own encyclopedia of who I was, and who was there with me, and what might be useful and meaningful to who is there now. More precisely, I find myself serving as the witness to how we thought it was when I arrived and what kind of future we thought we were creating. My interlocutors are the people living the consequences of those decisions, contending with circumstances we couldn’t have anticipated, forging a future that I probably won’t see. 

And that, I suppose, is as it should be.

A brief rumination by Kim Pearson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.