Yester & Morrow

I know I said zeroes don't count. But if they did, today would make an elegant palindrome: 01/11/10. Not that I want to be Janus-faced about this. Well, actually, I do. Today is as good a day as any to summon Janus, the two-faced god of doors, gates, and portals, the eponym of January and janitors. Here we have January 11, with one one facing one way and one one facing the other, like a two-chimed doorbell. ("You rang?" as Maynard G. Krebs used to say on "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis.")

I summoned Janus once before for a college reunion essay I wrote ten years ago. Found him in the Palindrome Café, decaf-faced. One face, Yester, was gazing out the window, dreamy and nostalgic, benignly awash in old TV shows, song lyrics, and other trivia. The other, Morrow, was equally absorbed in the future, peering intently at his Pot Pal laptop: cutting edge, ahead of the curve. Morrow was speed-talking about something called influency, where you can see on-screen how the past affects the future. Yester was reminiscing about a Doors concert from our junior year. And then everyone in the café broke into a rendition of "Break on Through to the Other Side".

I'm more of a Yester guy, temperamentally. Tend to dwell in the past. But this blog was Morrow's idea, or rather, Paul DePaolo's. He's more of a Morrow guy, I suspect. Obviously we need both: the conscience and the visionary, the historian and the planner, the golden oldies and the new wave...

I feel like I've heard that before, Yester might nod. But Morrow gets the last word: Tell me something I don't know.