One of my favorite books as a kid was William Sleator's The Green Futures of Tycho, published in 1981, about a kid from 1981 who visits the far-flung future of April, 2001. In April of 2001, it turns out, we have cities on the moon, but people still use typewriters. Seems ridiculous in retrospect, but from the vantage point of '81, what the world might look like twenty years later was just a wild guess.

When we incoming fourth-graders at Taft Elementary School in Orange, California, had our class pictures taken in 1981, we had just as little idea what might become of us twenty years later. Once that year we had to write stories about our lives in the new millennium, full of hovercars and intermarriage among the members of our class. The fact that we'd be going our separate ways after 1984 didn't seem to occur to many of us at the time. Only about a third of my classmates went to the same junior high as me in '84, and when I changed school districts in '86, I fully expected never to see any of these people again.

But my book has done some really remarkable things over the past year. It was the vehicle through which I got back in touch with an old classmate of mine at Troy High who I'd been trying to track down for twelve years; it allowed me to meet one of my favorite artists in any medium, see hundreds upon hundreds of amazing, unpublished photographs, and even take one home; and just this week, it prompted a couple of my fourth-grade classmates at Taft Elementary to zap me some email. One of them turned out to live right in my own neighborhood, and yesterday we walked around the park a bit and caught up. We reminisced about one-liners from two decades before and talked about what we'd been up to over the past seventeen years or so. It was beyond cool.

But the most interesting bit was when we found a bench and she pulled out a stack of color copies of our class photos and filled me in on what had become of everyone: who'd become a ski instructor, who a nurse, who a librarian, who a professional psychic; who'd married early, who more recently, who was still single, who'd turned out to be gay (a word I learned on the first day of fourth grade, most ubiquitous of the playground taunts.) It was all interesting information, but that was just a small fraction of what made the little briefing so cool. See, it didn't feel like I was learning about the current situation of people I'd known a lifetime before. It was like being back in elementary school again — and seeing the future. The far-flung future of April, 2001.

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