Galvin crop

Lately, I’ve been feeling nostalgic for the future.

Not the future that appears before us — the one filled with trepidation and doomsaying, distrust and sociocultural wars over America’s identity and spirit.

You can take that future and stick it where the sun don’t shine.

No, these days when I look out on inversion-draped mornings, my mind wanders to the wide-open horizons of the days of yore. Days when we were told that “anything is possible” by those who might still conceive of that to be true.

“In the future, there will be flying cars.”

If we heard it once, we heard it eleventy-seven million times. Not that we believed it, regardless of how the Jetsons showed us it was possible.

George couldn’t even stop the treadmill — but somehow we were to accept that he could navigate an airborne vehicle through rush-hour traffic. What would happen if accidents sent car parts darting toward the ground? Drivers can’t even figure out how to park safely at Trader Joe’s now, and you want them dropping in from above?

Ruht-roh.

And, of course, times being as advanced as they are, a proliferation of flying cars would call for street reconfigurations to provide safety lanes for the eventual influx of flying bicycles — whether or not you believe that a 500% increase in soaring pedal-pushers would pass either the eye or the sniff test.

We knew enough to shoot down the validity of flying cars even then, but that wasn’t the point.

The future was where we could boldly go where no one had gone before. Lunar landings had proved that the surface was safe enough to swing a makeshift 6 iron. With enough time and ingenuity, we might even develop a knife that could cut a tin can in half, then slice a tomato.

Possibilities, like time, were endless in the future — and The Flying Car Generation was so jazzed, we couldn’t wait to get there.

Now, though? Enthusiasm doesn’t come as naturally as it once did. It must be mustered. The horizon no longer seems to stretch to infinity, and it feels more appropriate to relish the present than to catch up to the daze of future past.

Wait, when did Paul Fattig hack into my keyboard?

(I just made a joke for a dozen people … well, 13, once someone explains it to Paul.)

Hot dawg! I’m on a roll!!

Maybe it’s the morning fog I find myself trapped by, or perhaps just that persistent inversion layer outside my window. The prominent question of decades ago — “What do you want to be when you grow up?” — doesn’t apply, as anyone who knows me would tell you, because it assumes facts not in evidence.

It’s common to find oneself in such a pickle. (Oh, c’mon, you knew I’d get there eventually.)

As we age, we recalibrate everything from our expectations to our long-term goals to the very definition of what we consider to be “long-term.” Adjustments take time, and they’re not always filled with flights of fancy.

So, if the road before the members of The Flying Car Generation is paved in realistic terms — straight ahead, intruded upon by stoplights and intersections, congestion forced upon us by the dozens using bike lanes at any hour of the day — then that’s OK.

The future might not be what it once was, but perhaps it’s best to approach it with the security of being grounded.