Last year I changed my cell ringtone to Alan Jackson's poignant hit song "Remember When."
I wasn't making the change out of a mourning for any lost love, but rather to remind me to pause regularly to recall everything this lifetime has brought my way across the past 75 years.
It reminds me to try and dredge up my earliest memory along with everything experienced in growing through childhood into an adult, and now a septuagenarian.
The song really provides an impetus for each of us to reflect on where we've each been and what lies ahead as the days rapidly dwindle before our eyes.
My earliest memory was crawling behind a chair in the living room and peeking out to watch an intense program on a very small TV screen with rabbit ears, which for a 2-year-old was frightening.
From that point, many memories tend to jumble through time in an assortment of experiences. I recall falling from my Flexy Racer at age 8 as I lost control of the steering and crashed into a ditch. Mom spent several evenings afterwards using a needle to dig out little stones and twigs from the nasty puncture wound in my right hand.
The two years we spent on Okinawa where my father, the lieutenant colonel, was stationed, remain surprisingly clear for me being just 10 years old at the time. Adventurous hikes with my brother into the mountains behind our home turned up bullet casings, unexploded ordnance and human remains, all uncollected following the bloody battle for control of that 60-mile-long island during World War II.
The years that followed in Fort Smith, at the Pine Bluff Arsenal and in North Little Rock, and the mid-teen years as a freshman and sophomore at my hometown of Harrison served to put me in the middle for coming of age.
There were the sock hops, carport parties, football, track, close friends that remain to this day and the joys of wading Crooked Creek together and reeling in stringers of brown bass and bream. I discovered Clearasil, English Leather, Aqua Velva and Brylcreem, where just a little dab would do me.
Then it was off to Albuquerque where Dad, by then retired, had launched an appliance business. In my junior and senior years at Highland High School, I learned to appreciate the desert Southwest and Hispanic culture. I also discovered the coffee shops at quirky Santa Fe and ice-fishing with buddies during January on nearby reservation lakes.
It was there my self-awareness fully blossomed. I began to see myself through the eyes of others I knew and befriended. For the first time at about 17, I began to understand others' lives mattered as much as my own.
That was quite a revelation for a teenaged boy who spent roughly half his time thinking about those of the opposite sex and hoping some of them liked me.
Things about my appearance, what I wore and demeanor that seemed so important (almost life-or-death critical at the time) became inconsequential by the time I'd reach my 23rd birthday and was graduating from the University of Central Arkansas.
I recollect on the birth of my son during my senior year and the late Professor Dean Duncan, a mentor and major influence in my career to come, along with philosophy professor Patrick Murray, who taught me to think like an adult and who would later become an ordained Episcopal priest.
My first journalism job as editor of the Newport Daily Independent lasted just over two years when, at age 26, publisher Walter Hussman Jr. hired me for a similar role at the larger Sentinel-Record in Hot Springs. It's surprising to me I can remember many stories and events at both of those newspapers as if they happened last year.
The day we drove out of Hot Springs in 1980 bound for the Los Angeles Times where I'd taken a position as a staff writer, State Police troop commander Capt. Gene Donham and his lieutenant escorted us to the Garland County line to avoid being waylaid by the local sheriff who'd vowed revenge on me for the stories we'd done exposing corruption on his watch.
I remember the sheriff's cars coming in from the highway where they had been waiting. When we pulled to the side after crossing the county line and shaking hands as I thanked him, it was the last time I'd see Captain Donham.
So many still-familiar faces, some with names forgotten, flash before me in the years that followed in a career that led to Chicago, Phoenix, Ohio State, Little Rock and New Jersey before returning to Arkansas and the Northwest Arkansas Times at Fayetteville in 1995.
As with those reading today, there have been so many memories that comprise this lifetime. It's little wonder I selected Jackson's song to remind me to remember when those previous chapters were still considered "todays."
Say, come to think of it, if we happen to lose all our memories at the end of life, how can we know for certain if we were ever even here for a short time?
Now go out into the world and treat everyone you meet exactly like you want them to treat you.
Mike Masterson is a longtime Arkansas journalist, was editor of three Arkansas dailies and headed the master's journalism program at Ohio State University. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.