Seems Like Forever Child Ago...

Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away - Marcus Aurelius

Over the past twelve years, a myriad of events have come and gone, some never to be forgotten, and others barely remarkable in the vast expanse that is our individual memory. For instance do you remember when you last owned, or watched something, anything, on a VHS tape? Or, where you were on September 11, 2001? Do you remember any of these other events that have occurred in the past dozen years?

2004

• Facebook was launched
• Sumatra earthquake caused the tsunami which devastated Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand

2005

• YouTube was launched
• Pope John Paul II died
• Prince Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles
• Hurricane Katrina
• First successful face transplant

2006

• Twitter was launched
• Pluto was expelled from the "United Federation of Planets 'cause they [didn't] speak English anyways"
• Saddam Hussein executed
• The "Housing Bubble" burst

2007

• Britney Spears shaved her head
• The iPhone made its global debut
• Virginia Tech University campus massacre
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is published

2008

• Barack Obama was elected President
• Bernie Madoff, made off with $18 Billion in the world's greatest Ponzi scheme
• The cyclone Nargis made landfall on Myanmar's west coast killing 138,000 people
• The Olympic flame was lit in Beijing China
• The King's of Leon used somebody
• General Motors filed for bankruptcy, and Chevrolet, following a US taxpayer bailout of $51 billion, literally became "America's Best Trucks"
• Blu-Ray disc hit the consumer market

2009

• The King of Pop, Michael Jackson, died
• The Fort Hood Massacre
• Sarah Palin was the Republican Vice Presidential Nominee

2010

• Wikileaks and Julian Assange leaked into the public view with the publication of 400,000 pages of classified information known as the "Iraqi War Logs"
• Deepwater Horizon, also known as the BP or British Petroleum, oil spill oozed 210,000,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf.

• While the Gulf awaited its own bailing out, the European Commission, European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailed out the country of Greece for the measly sum of $122 billion.
• A devastating earthquake struck Haiti killing around 160,000
• An earthquake off the coast of Chile sent a massive tsunami inland killing 550 people
• Adele rolled in the deep
• The King's Speech won the Oscar for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, and Best Actor as Colin Firth showed us just how to speak the Queen's English.

2011

• Following an earthquake, a tsunami struck Japan causing untold destruction including the Sendai nuclear meltdown 

• Prince William married Kate Middleton
• Osama bin Laden was killed
• The 99% Occupied Wall Street
• The Space Shuttle took its last flight

2012

• Aurora Theatre massacre
• Sandy Hook massacre
• Hurricane Sandy moved from the Caribbean to Canada and all coast line points in between and unleashed her $75 billion wrecking ball of destruction, taking 233 lives
• The US Embassy in Benghazi was attacked

2013

• Boston Marathon bombing
• Edward Snowden leaked CIA information
• The Ebola virus began its destructive spread along the west coast of Africa
• Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge was born
• Jordan rolled as Twelve Years a Slave won the Oscar for Best Picture

2014

• The Olympic flame lights up Sochi Russia
• Malaysian Flight 370 disappeared
• The [Un]Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) began leaving its mark, and hasn't stopped yet.
• Germany wins the FIFA World Cup

2015

• The Baltimore Riots
• San Bernardino massacre
• Airbus A320-211 crashes in the French Alps, killing 150
• A magnitude 7.5 earthquake strikes the Hindu Kush region and causes 398 deaths (279 in Pakistan, 115 in Afghanistan and 4 in India)
• The Zika virus outgrew its narrow equatorial-Africa belt and spread to the Americas
• Princess Charlotte Elizabeth Diana of Cambridge is born

To be honest I didn't remember many of these, and some of them seemed so commonplace, I couldn't really think of a time they didn't exist. What should be one of my barely remarkable memories is that since March 2004 we have not owned a VHS player. See, I told you it was a barely remarkable memory. But why do I remember it so well?

To tell you the truth I didn't remember it that well, I had to sit and think about it following an experience my wife had with Ethan. While at his day program Ethan was taken on a field trip to Savers. There, with approval from the store, he was allowed to look through the DVD cases and take out all the filler papers. We have literally hundreds of these papers in our house. They get collected, carried around, and eventually will get laminated and cut into small images, then get carried around in a ziplock baggie for months and months.

If you ever see us in public, most likely, if you look close, you will see a small bulge just above Ethan's waist. There, underneath his t-shirt, he secures his little of baggie of images. He accesses them by reaching his arm down through the neck of his t-shirt. Presently there are two baggies of images down his shirt.

Well, during the Saver's trip, Ethan came across a filler that referenced an old video game. A video game which happened to have made its public debut two years before he was born. The announcement, rather commercial, for the Game Boy Pagemaster video game was part of the previews on The Pagemaster VHS tape. The Pagemaster is one of Ethan's all time favorites, but we haven't owned or viewed on VHS since 2004. 

After getting home from the field trip my wife asked Ethan what he did for the day. Here is what happened... (turn up the volume)

Here's a segment of the original VHS I found on YouTube - which by the way Ethan didn't know was available on YouTube.

Now, that's what I call a memory. No in fact I would call it a FOR-Ev-ER Child memory!