We spend our youth convinced that time is a vast, unmapped continent. We measure it in the infinite stretch of summer afternoons and the agonizingly slow crawl toward the milestones of adulthood. We are rich in hours, spending them like pocket change because the vault seems bottomless. Then, the math starts to change. You look back from the vantage of nearly five decades—or look ahead toward sixty—and realize the "long road" was actually just a series of rooms we passed through very quickly. The Architecture of Memory Childhood is built on a foundation of "forevers": the permanent scent of sun-warmed asphalt and the absolute certainty that the giants who raised us would never grow frail. But then one day we look back and realize that they're older; their joints are frail, and their gait is much slower.    That's when you know that the time behind you isn't coming back.  But the true "death of innocence" isn’t a single event; it’s a quiet hand-o...