Sometimes, we don’t notice time passing.

Other times, we see others become aware. Our 4.5-year-old boy has just started cataloging his experiences into years. “We first visited this place in 2007.” “In 2008, my favorite number was one hundred, but now it’s nine.” And so I realize how much he remembers, how to him his life already seems long. Yet he has only the barest inkling that it’s finite.

And sometimes, it’s personally painful. Perhaps one has to get close to middle age in order to become teary at the loss of talented strangers one never met, like Joe Raposo and others. Maybe it’s only the generation immediately before – the ones who informed one’s childhood and hammered a golden nail of permanent reverence into one’s brain – whose gradual passing seems so damn tragic.