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I used to go to a small store in a mall to buy my comic books and science fiction magazines. It’s not there anymore. The mall itself is gone.

But when I was a child, Superman flew to distant planets in colored ink on paper, not in 3D in Hollywood. A man whose entire body was a canvas for tattoo artists was a Ray Bradbury oddity, not an everyday occurrence. My imagination was filled with unrealized possibilities. So was yours.

I played on dangerous construction sites, walked around to houses on Halloween with other kids and no adults. I made my own play dates—spontaneously.

The sky was bluer than seems possible today. Swarms of birds, huge swarms sweeping across the sky in the morning by the bus stop before school, put me into a hypnotic reverie. A groaning engine would break the moment and I’d dash for the bus. Childhood was a rambunctious meditation.

Sitting alone in my room with my comic books and science fiction magazines and adventure novels and Weekly Readers, I’d project the emerging wonders of the present into the near and distant future. People and probes raced into space. Hearts and kidneys were replaced like plumbing parts. War was raging, but there were loud objections to it—even in the halls of power. Surely an era of peace was coming.

Adulthood seemed frightening, but less so in anticipation of the exciting and benevolent world that I could imagine and expect. Junior High and algebra seemed more of a threat.

Then the future came. No jet packs, and trips to distant worlds were postponed indefinitely. Wars changed but continued. The magic of modern agriculture failed to wipe out hunger and machine-driven technology failed to end poverty.

Utopia was within reach but the human race rejected it, instead indulging their fears and superstitions and a multitude of base instincts. For awhile, I still dreamed inside cubicles and subway cars. It could still happen. The disappointments were the last angry gasp of the dying old order. Surely, I wasn’t the only one who dreamed and carried his dreams into adulthood.

There had to be others.

Now all I want to do is go into to my room, close the door and my eyes, and travel to a distant world, a better world. But it’s not there anymore.