So. We've

passed through a sort of portal, like the time warp of

science fiction films (think "Final

Countdown").

Even if we

stayed up until midnight, didn't it seem as though we

went to bed in one century and woke up in the next? We've

moved from the past to the future, from the old to the

new, from a sense of some security, some familiarity, to

the largely unknown. Into a Brave New World, perhaps. Or

the Land of Oz. It's a scary place.

The fear of

Y2K disasters proved unfounded, although I tend to agree

with those that say the dangers were real indeed, and

that good planning and preventive medicine kept any

computer glitches from wreaking serious mischief.

I've

written before about my musings as a child, when I did

the math almost everyone has done at some point in their

life, and discovered I'd be 63 years old when the year

2000 began. Sixty-three years old! What a tragedy, I

thought, to live through such a momentous event and be

too old to know what was going on!

How sad

that I would probably sleep through it, or weakly blow a

whistle from the confines of my rocking chair. What a

pity not to be out partying with the rest of the world.

I'd like to shake that child and her pathetic vision of

the person I am today. She couldn't believe I wouldn't be

decrepit at this age, but in fact, I feel exactly as I

did at 30, give or take an occasional tinge in knees and

back, and some holiday-generated lumpiness.

(Admittedly,

I was not out carousing Friday night, unless you count a

rip-roaring progressive dinner right here in town with

nine other couples from church.)

Much has

been said this past week about the changes this century

has brought to ordinary people's lives. Most have been in

technology; some, thank God, at least in the United

States, have been in ways we behave toward others across

lines of race, social status, religion and gender.

I'm old

enough to marvel at changes I've seen in my own lifetime.

Here are a few of my favorites, most of which I haven't

heard mentioned during the obligatory century-end summing

up of advances:

� The interstate highway system .

That may surprise you, given my passion for devising ways

that will let us give up our cars. But if you remember

the terrible danger of two- and four-lane roads and

passing lanes, the real labor it used to be to drive

through mountains like Pennsylvania's, you'll understand

when I say that the interstates opened this country to

ordinary people, made accessible its beauty, made

possible family visits that were once out of the

question.

� The Salk vaccine and antibiotics .

We were among the first parents who didn't have to

agonize about our kids being maimed or killed by polio as

our parents did.

� No smoking . I wouldn't have

dreamed even 20 years ago that smoking would be banned

from most public places in my lifetime.

� Television . This oft-maligned

tool is like any other, with potential for good and for

evil. I regret the homogenization, the blurring of

regional distinctions I think TV has effected, and I

blame mindless hours in front of the tube for much of our

national dumbing down. Nonetheless, I celebrate the

global community it has helped create - never more

beautifully than just this last week, when we shared the

wonder of a new millennium with people on a beach in

Kiribati, at St. Basil's in Moscow, at the South Pole, in

front of the Acropolis, beside a remote bay in

Newfoundland, along the Seine and the Thames, in Derry,

and among the pyramids.

� Credit cards (for that

matter, any magnetically encoded cards that open doors,

check out library books, pay for telephone calls, and do

so many tasks with a single swipe.) I can't imagine my

own parents using credit cards: Being in debt, even for a

month, was simply not an option.

� The Internet and personal

computers . You knew I'd include these. What bridges

they build! How small they've shrunk the world, and how

wondrously they've helped knit together families and

friends with instantaneous communication that once took

months to exchange!

On Sunday

the preacher said, "Those who awaited the arrival of

the second millennium, even those who watched as 1899

became 1900, had fears of their own. They could not

imagine that at the end of the second millennium, their

descendants would be worrying about a computer bug. They

couldn't even have imagined a computer."

Nor could

they have imagined doctors looking into human bodies and

excising tissue without a knife; that we could read a

newspaper printed in Singapore before it was on the

streets; seeing galaxies 50 million light years away by

means of an orbiting telescope.

Which

raises an interesting question. What will worry our

children's grandchildren most about the next century? We

can easily imagine warfare, trips to Mars, long-distance

medicine, maybe time travel - these are all

extensions of things we already know. But what

capabilities will our descendants have that are as far

beyond our imagining as many of our commonplace tools

would have been beyond the comprehension of our

forebears?

The future

is a scary place. And there's no going back.

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