Teasingly, I say to Tai-Fu that the reason he remembers so much and I so little is that he is a pessimist, whereas I am an optimist. A pessimist puts his golden age in the past, an optimist puts his in the future. I may have deliberately buried my store of childhood experiences so that I won39;t be tempted to stay there, so that I can be more accepting of the present and acquire an outlook toward the future that is hopeful rather than anxious.