Alternative Lifetimes

If I could have chosen when and where I was born, it would have been in one of five (or four of five, if it could have been gotten away with) chrono-geographic locations. Actually, I'm not going to list the birth years but, instead, the years that I would like to have been 18 years of age in. 1) London, 1818, in about the middle of the Romantic period of the arts. 2) London, 1850, in the full flowering of the Industrial Revolution, when change, innovation and exploration were at a peak and your local chemist had all manner of nifty substances for sale OTC. 3) Paris, Left Bank, 1927, among the artists of the Lost Generation. 4) San Francisco, 1948, as part of the Beat Generation. 5) Toronto, 1965, just 10 years prior to my "real" year, in order to take the fullest advantage of the "hippie era."

Now, I'm not saying that coming of age in the first half of the 70's was unfortunate, just that there have been other eras in which the possibilities for intellectual stimulation, as well as a wider range of planes of pleasure, were more abundant.