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I'm out of the cave, but a clone of no one
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 16, 2001 One day in 1988 a 96-year-old man wandered out of an Inverness nursing home, clad in only a diaper, apparently trying to make it to his nearby home. Before he could, a truck hit and killed him on State Road 44. What brings that sad accident to mind for me today is a particularly graceful piece of writing about it by Ned Barnett, formerly of the St. Petersburg Times and now a sports columnist at the Raleigh (N.C.) News and Observer. Barnett went to the trouble of finding out more about the man and said he "emerges from the reports of his death like a ghostly figure, a survivor from an age long ago dead. In 1988 in the closing years of the 20th century, there was this 19th-century man up and walking along a roadside in the predawn mist." Monday's paper made me feel kind of the same way. I'll bet Barnett, who at 45 is considerably younger than I, hasn't yet thought of himself as a 20th century man up and walking around in the 21st century. But the lead story of the local edition of the Times at my house Monday was about a Rendezvous of Mountain Men at the Withlacoochee River Park -- a group of re-enactors dedicated to preserving the past. A few pages away in the Tampa & State section was a brief story about physicist Stephen Hawking saying that he expects us to have engineered an "improved" human race by the next generation . . . if we don't destroy ourselves. If ever a generation has been on the cusp of two different times, this one has. I have good friends who are re-enactors, and except for a very few who wish things could regress socially as well as chronologically, they are good people. These folks can freak out at the sight of a digital watch or ballpoint pen in the campsite; they are that purist about it. Try as I might, and I have, I just can't slip into the revery that they so much enjoy. I always find myself looking around at my surroundings and at the authentically dressed people around me, and thinking, "Great, here I am 108 years before the invention of penicillin and well before anesthesia and sterile surgery were invented." The very next thought that comes to me is, "I'll bet I have appendicitis." Sorry, guys, I like air conditioning, television, cold beer and even the Internet too much to want to go back. But do I want to go where Hawking's brilliant mind is taking him? Hawking says he doesn't necessarily approve of genetic engineering, simply that he thinks it is going to happen. There are a few things I would, given the chance, redesign about my body. For one thing, I would have my teeth made of stainless steel, like the guy in the James Bond movies, so I can take my dentist and periodontist off my speed dial. I would have my eyeglasses and my hat (both of which I spend an inordinate amount of time looking for) affixed permanently to my body. Yes, I know they will eventually design eyes that don't go bad, but I like my glasses. They can make me look smarter than I am, and -- pulled slightly askew while I breathe heavily and mumble at people ahead of me in buffet lines -- they can also make me look scarier. At the end of my time, maybe some young journalist might point out that I came from a day before jet passenger travel, a day when "Hi-Fi's" had turntables and when you could freak your parents out without piercing any part of your body. If you will, record then that I was happy to be beyond the mountain men and before the Hawking man. I had some comforts, and I never had to live in a body designed by the people who gave us the Edsel and the coffeemaker that routinely spews brown stuff all over our office. Just say I counted my blessings.
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