Recognizing beauty in life, evolves with life stages.

I rediscovered where I came from this weekend, sitting in a diner that's been serving people of all ages for longer than I've been alive.

Fifty years ago, teenage girls in poodle skirts and cardigans bounced in to giggle at the boys in lettermen jackets at the next table.

I sat there with two severely hung over friends near a kid with a black concert t-shirt and skin sleeves of ink.

I looked out through the windows at the buildings across the street. Tan brick, low constructions of about 4 floors, they were planned long before elevators were considered pedestrian devices by society. The original windows remained intact, rounded Victorian Bay windows spanning the corners of the building so that residents could have a number of views.

All of the downtown area remains architecurally intact, just as it was 50 or 60 years before. The buildings, so squat, sit there unassuming, welcoming me just as they welcomed girls in poodle skirts and then hippies in tie-dyes and then couples in leisure suits and then teens in acid washed jeans for decades before I came around.

While many in America find joy and comfort in what is new, perhaps a modern day transcendence of the American Dream, I find comfort in what remains from yesterday.

Architecture has always fascinated me, as has past cultures. My father always knew that the best way to keep me quiet on family vacations was to direct me to the local museum. On of my early favorite museum exhibits is the Mummy exhibit in Phillie. I can remember being about 10 or 11 and begging for my father to buy the catalog for me, and I still have it.

When I moved to London, one of the first moments I can remember of feeling safe and at home, was, strangely, when I ran my hands over the stone holes left in a government building from the WWII mortars.

This weekend, when I looked out at these buildings that I've seen since I was 2 weeks old, it was the same effect of running my hands over those mortar cracks and crevices in London. I felt safe.

People had been here before me and people will be here after me. Just as I wonder about the joys they experienced and their hardships, some day a long time from now there will be another girl. She will be fascinated with Pompei and Mummy's and one day, she look out at the town and wonder, "Were they happy? Did they live happy lives."

If she listens really closely, as I did today, the ocean may whisper in her ears, "Yes."

I hope she has those buildings to look at 20 years from now, and to project her imagination about the people who must have passed through them while passing time.

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