Rain and coffee can do it to a guy.

You get older, and you get these flashback moments.

This morning, with the sound of rain outside and classical music on the radio -- coffee and a newspaper -- I'm somehow thinking back to an amalgam of similarly stimulating mornings during the 1980's. The wild card in all this is a memory from nowhere: European Journal, the weekly half-hour news wrap-up that used to appear on KET.

I can't remember when it aired, only that I regularly videotaped the episodes and was so enamored of the whole idea of a news show in English about Europe that I once wrote the producers asking if tours of the studio in Cologne were available. They said yes. I never went.

Of course, the items that constituted European Journal's eagerly awaited weekly content are available to me on the information superhighway, 24 hours a day. But learning isn't entirely about content, is it? It's also about style, and a mode of presentation. Indulging my fascination with brief news stories, soaking up the scraps of information, aching to go there and to see it, to do that, to be there; perhaps I'm beyond that sort of giddy excitement now.

Perhaps, although I can still feel the adrenalin of pure discovery nipping at the frayed edges of stress-ridden consciousness. Nothing stays the same, and I know that. Nostalgia most often is a misplaced, over-romanticized emotion, and I also know that. Yet, some times, surely it's acceptable to give in.

Give me a rabbit hole or a time warp and tell me it leads back to 1985 ... would I choose it and start over? I couldn't tell you, although probably not. It was what it was, in the time it was, and it cannot be again. But I revisit it, looking for clues about who I am, now.