The Coins of Our Innocence

I have been on a trip down memory lane the last couple of days.  Over the weekend I was at Fry's Electronics and I picked up a CD of Bob Seger's Greatest Hits. Most of them are songs that I remember from my teens and early twenties (a few later). Lyrically they are very much bounded by the time and place in which they were written and they reflect a sort of wistful innocence that I didn't recall in them the first time around.  Of course, I am an entirely different person now then I was back in those days - changed in large part by the wealth of experience that lies within the last thirty years of my life. It is kind of amazing to me though that the songs can evoke the echo of a feeling - the same feeling I had when I first heard a lot of those songs.  They remind me heavily of old times, old friends, old lovers, and the old events they were a sound track too.  Then I wonder of course - dang, was I ever that innocent?  The answer of course is yes.  In each year of our life we learn new things, we are transformed by the things we learn, and we lose a small portion of our innocence because we see and experience things we had never experienced before. In the best of all possible worlds we trade the coins of our innocence for the wisdom of our age.