By Neil Ellis Orts

It was a Sunday evening. I was a preschooler. Mama and Daddy were somewhere outside, at the barn or pig pens, doing I don't know what. Evening chores or repairing something, I guess. The TV was on to the current iteration of the Walt Disney program. My brother, Gary, four years older than I, was in the house with me.

I started crying.

Gary, surely puzzled, called Mama to the house. Out on the screened porch, she asked me what was wrong. Sniffling, I tried to explain. The TV show was so good and she was missing it. I wanted her to see it, too.

Mama said to go back in and watch it, it was okay, I should enjoy it. She said she and Daddy would be in as soon as they finished what they were doing.

I guess she went back outside. I guess I went back to the TV and watched with Gary. Everything else is pretty much forgotten.

This is my earliest memory of what I've come to call my "sense of never again." It's an ache I recognized later, in high school, when we read Our Town by Thornton Wilder. When Emily leaves her grave to revisit one day in her life, she sees all the minutia we never pay attention to, all the details of a life we let slip by without proper appreciation. She grieves these moments as a spirit, but I envied her the ability to do that. I grieved the same things while living, without the ability to refresh my memory via time travel.

It's a sense I don't notice in many other people and maybe it's even rarer in these days of easy playback. In the days of my childhood—the above would have happened about 1970—many things appeared on TV once and disappeared, presumably forever. Nowadays, shows are available immediately after broadcast online and released as a DVD set at the end of the season.

Or maybe everyone has this sense to some degree—hence the ubiquitous digital cameras everywhere, recording so many moments of our lives.

It's hard to say what lies behind these things. I can only report my experience.

It was the summer of 1978. I was 14. Gary graduated from high school that May and moved off the farm immediately. This was the biggest change in my life to that point. It brought on a crisis of "never again."

To say I was lonely only begins to describe that summer. Suddenly hyper-aware of life changing, I began to notice other changes on the farm, things I couldn't quite remember. That screened porch I mentioned? It had since been closed in to enlarge the kitchen. What did the old kitchen look like? Where did we keep things in it? What did we keep on the screened porch?