Reality.. was, and is?

I'm preparing to take a flight (real... Continental Airlines) into my past... to the scene of the most powerfully iconic places of childhood and youth... have not been there in more than 50 years... other than----briefly for a few funerals (where both parents, paternal grandparents, aunt are all buried, on a glacial morain in a cherry orchard overlooking Lake Michigan) --and am in no way prepared to deal with the massive cognitive dissonance this will unleash.