Looking Back
John Abelson

When I was 12, I didn’t have much of a past but I could have wondered about the future. I don’t remember doing that but If I had it would probably have been about the near future: Will I make the football team in my Freshman year? Now I am 87 and the future I could have wondered about when I was 12 has now happened. I can’t remember everything that happened (and who could?) But some of the events I can remember: they are mostly the ones I told stories about and it is usually the case that though they happened, I now tell a distorted story.

It seems to me that now is the time to write down those memories and to collect what I did write down. The usual thing is to write an autobiography* or get someone else to do it for you. So I decided to do that but in a website. The website allows me to post stories that I have already written both personal and scientific,to record memories some of which I may never have had before, to provide a chronology, to post selected photos, to enumerate favorite books, movies, songs etc and to share recipes. I have a blog in which I discuss various scientific topics- For example I saw an inchworm on the deck of our house at Priest Lake. How do they do their progressive loop locomotion?

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln: Four score and seven years ago my father (and mother) brought forth on this continent a new boy (me), conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that anything is possible. Now is the time to check that out.

*My mother did exactly that in her book “Going my Way”