“How sad, how strange, the days that are no more,” Tennyson said. Fifty years ago, the best-selling “Future Shock” suggested too much change too fast was making us cuckoo. We didn’t know the half of it. We now seem to be deep in the heart of daily Present Shock.

Approaching Thanksgiving, the news was all about how the climate change weather was going to bollix up holiday air travel, not to mention the peril to the big balloons in the Macy’s parade. Sunday, when many will be trying to get back home to resume their labors, is predicted to be the busiest in aviation history with 3.6 million tickets booked.

All of this, like much of the rest of post-modern life, makes me feel like Rip Van Winkle. This world is a far cry from that of my earliest memories. One is of getting caught in a gigantic blizzard driving home from Thanksgiving at the home of my paternal grandmother, Marie.

We were forced to pull off a highway laden with impassibly deep snow and wait on the berm for a snowplow to come by. It got very cold as darkness fell because we could only turn on the engine to heat the car occasionally for fear of running out of gas and becoming permanently snowbound.

Then, no one we knew flew anywhere for anything. For longer trips one might take a train powered by steam engines, but to see the relatives once or twice a year required a drive in my Dad’s Packard while it lasted, then a Chevy or Ford. Only my uppity Uncle Lloyd had something more posh, a Buick. No one imagined a day would come when they owned a car from Germany, Italy, Japan or Korea. Only a few years before we were born, our parents had fought against those countries.

Then, Thanksgiving hadn’t morphed into a four-day holiday. Working stiffs like my Mom and Dad had to get in the car Wednesday evening or early Thursday morning to start driving to the home of one of my relatives three or four hours distant.

This was before the interstate system had cut drive time dramatically, so our route ran through stubbly fields on either side and down the main streets of towns with names like Strongsville, Wooster, Mt. Vernon and Washington Court House.

After the meal and a few hours with the women cleaning up the kitchen and the men smoking and watching the Thanksgiving football game between Green Bay and Detroit on a black and white TV, we had to get back in the car and drive so the grown-ups could go back to work on Friday.

My father worked for a family owned, paternalistic, industrial company that resisted unionization. Instead of higher wages, families got a turkey at Thanksgiving, a ham at Easter, and each summer the whole family could spend a day at an old-fashioned amusement park with wooden roller coaster and paddle-boats on a lake.

The ham may have come from Swift and Company which had a plant next to the Cleveland Union Stockyards where my mom worked as a secretary. Her stockyards, dad’s factory, and the amusement park are gone, have become merely memories of the long ago and faraway. Only hams and turkeys remain the same.

If we live long enough we all become time-traveling orphans who find ourselves weirdly transported to an unfamiliar landscape populated by people we do not know. Most days, we are strangers and afraid in a world we never made. Somedays, as on a day of remembrance such as Thanksgiving, we are transported for a moment in the opposite direction, back to a world peopled with long lost friends and relatives we seem to have mislaid.

I think of all those people around the table so many decades ago — my father, Hayden Carl, his sister and brother — Aunt Viola and Uncle Lloyd, their spouses and offspring, their mother Marie and her sisters and brother — Aunt Dutch, Aunt Hon, and Uncle Emerson. I miss going to see them for a day and then returning to the hometown I loved.

It, too, is now changed beyond recognition, except perhaps for the scarlet maple leaves that spiral down each Autumn to decorate the sidewalks of locally quarried sandstone. I realize I am become Ishmael. Like him, I can truthfully say, “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” And soon I too will fall silent and all my memories be lost.

This is the human condition, as Marcus Aurelius told us 1,800 years ago. “How quickly all things disappear. Bodies into the universe, memories of them in time.”