Believe me, please, those were good times, of outings and treats and children unspoiled, of loveless marriages that lasted, of bashfulness and complexes, when a Frenchman walked a high wire between the Twin Towers and a German teenager landed on Red Square, before Times Square lost its tawdry soul and downtowns got prettified, before personal trainers and Pilates and Harry Potter, before sex in the city made TV, before teenagers said " totally " and " like " just to say something, when there were communes in Copenhagen and kibbutzim galore, and you could even smoke in a New York bar, before New Labor and the neocons and the nouveaux philosophes, not to mention the Bush Dynasty and China rising, in those times, when Schwarzenegger was a Terminator and no governor, before the World Wide Web and the rise of religious fundamentalism, I never thought about the attractions of the past.
