Memories: Ghosts We Hammer on the Anvil of life.

Our Lives are Forged by the relentless Hammer of Time

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It was early morning in Muscatine, Iowa — my hometown. I was just trying to get my steps in before the day got away from me and my time was overtaken by events.

As I always love to do when I’m back visiting, I was walking the same quiet streets that once carried a younger version of me to school, to friends’ houses, to nowhere in particular.

As I topped the hill near the old neighborhood, I looked up and saw a house I knew like muscle memory — the boyhood home of my friend, Bobby Koepping.

We’d known each other since kindergarten. Back in good old Madison Elementary, where I met so many of the people, I still call friends today.

Back then, we were inseparable — playing in the schoolyard, playing sports, riding bikes, talking about the future like we had all the time in the world.

But reality has a way of stealing that time away from us, putting different paths under our feet and different destinations on our horizon.

And then, just like that, I saw him. Walking his father — frail now, but steady — to the car. I almost didn’t believe it at first. It had been more than forty years.

“Good morning,” he said politely, the way you do to a stranger. But with that quizzical look — the one where memory is being sparked but you can’t quite place what you’re remembering, from when, or from where.

“Well, good morning, Bobby,” I replied.

He froze for just a second — then the recognition hit. “Oh, my goodness, good morning, Glen! Man, it’s good to see you! What are you doing in town?”

The smile. The handshake. The quick, familiar hug. For a moment, the years folded up like they’d never happened.

Decades rewound in an instant.

We talked briefly — he was taking his dad to a doctor’s appointment; I was visiting my mother.

We promised to catch up before I left town.

Maybe we will. Maybe we won’t.

I’ve been through this before, and always with the best intentions. But often life and schedules get in the way, and the euphoria of a reconnection fades, overtaken by other events.

I continued with my walk, now noticing small rain droplets starting to fall, picking up my pace to stay ahead of a cold fall rain in Iowa.

And that’s when the thinking started.

The Ghost of Familiar Faces

That spark — that immediate familiarity — it’s powerful. But it’s also an illusion.

When we see an old friend, what we really recognize isn’t them as they are now, but the ghost of who they were — and who we were.

It’s like a mirror reflecting the past, not the present. The person standing before me had lived an entirely different life from mine.

He stayed.

I left.

He worked hard, kept things simple. I wandered the world, wore uniforms, suits, and titles.

We’d been forged by different fires, struck by the same hammer of time but on different anvils of life.

That moment in the alley was more than a reunion. It was a collision between two timelines — two alloys that started from the same raw stock here in a small Iowa river town but were tempered by entirely different furnaces.

The Hammer and the Anvil

The thought stayed with me: we all come into life as base material — soft, unshaped, full of potential.

The anvil of life and the hammer of time do their work on us, again and again.

Every joy, loss, heartbreak, and victory — every relationship, job, risk, and mistake — is another strike.

Some are gentle taps; others hit like a blacksmith’s blow. The heat of experience softens us just enough for life to reshape us before cooling us in the chill of consequence.

The longer I thought about it, the more I realized — time’s strikes are never even.

Sometimes they come one after another, relentless, until you can’t tell what shape you’re becoming. Sometimes years pass quietly — until one day, one swing changes everything.

Some people become works of art — polished, balanced, strong in form and purpose. Others are bent, brittle, scarred — but still, undeniably human.

But the hammer keeps bending and shaping us. Beauty may get blemished by the next strike; the bent and brittle may get straightened and polished.

All of us get reheated — some choose to go back to the fire and let themselves be reshaped. Others are thrown back on the anvil by surprise.

That’s what struck me about seeing Bobby. We were both forged from the same starting stock but shaped into completely different things by the relentless hammering of time.

He’s the steady steel of a man who stayed grounded, stayed home, lived a life in the here and now.

I’m the tempered alloy of a life spent in motion. Neither better — just different.

When the Past Knocks

That’s the splendid beauty and the great sadness of old friendships — they remind us of who we were, but they can never fully take us back there.

I thought about how an old friendship is a foundation that can be built upon again.

However, unless we start forging something new, every reunion is just a rerun — a favorite movie where we skip to the best scenes and pretend, we don’t know how it ends.

To build a real friendship again, you have to put your metal back on the anvil. You have to forge new memories, not just polish the old ones.

Sometimes the older us can control the heat, guide the placement on the anvil, and help shape how the hammer of time will change the future us — and the memories we make.

Reflections

I hope Bobby and I will sit down this week.

Maybe we’ll grab a coffee, maybe a beer.

Maybe we’ll talk about life — and for sure, we’ll laugh at how old we’ve both gotten.

But if we do, I want it to be more than nostalgia. I want it to be the start of a new piece — a new shape being forged.

Because in the end, that’s what time and life demand of us.

Keep going back to the fire.

Keep facing the hammer.

And never forget — every strike is another chance to be shaped into something truer, stronger, and real.

Before the coals of the furnace cool and our time on the anvil comes to an end.

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