Lions are the last animals to know if they're lonely or not.  Like most other things nowadays, it seems to require an objective test rather than a feeling.

Togetherness doesn't mean what it once did in the sweet time between entering school & entering the workforce.  It now means investing headlong in the family thing or it means raising step kids & being with ex husbands.  The bandwidth of family animals is maxed out, investing everything they have in someone else. Lions wouldn't even know if they're deriving any togetherness from the family thing or racing to check off all the tasks like employees in a day job & day jobs never were much of a cure for loneliness.

Lions wouldn't consider their current lives enviable, just their free past lives being enviable. It's another one of those mortal constraints where you can never go back, you can't take it with you, & once it's over, it's over.  

Maybe it's another example of how lions don't belong in the present time but a world which existed 40 years ago.  

Lions pondered the idea of re-enacting the perfect summer day from childhood but there was another re-enactment idea.

In this re-enactment, all the members of our high school class woke up early, went to the high school during the typical hours & re-enacted our classes as if it was another day in the distant past.  It would be just the good parts, no tests, no assignments, no real teaching.  All the wrongs would be forgotten.  The teachers would all come back, old & grey.  We'd all be old versions of our past selves, sitting in the same desks, all family obligations shunned for a day. 

It would be logistically impossible of course.  You couldn't reserve the whole school for a day or burn a full day of everyone's time.  It could be a movie at best.  Not sure what the activities would be beyond just attending.  Maybe each class would begin with a speech & end with banter.  There were some classes which didn't have finals, where we didn't have anything to do for those last days.

It could end up like a more positive version of the breakfast club.  Disney managed to keep adults entertained for a full day in Galactic Star cruiser.

The last hour of such a re-enactment might be emotional as we realized it wasn't going to happen again & this trip back in time wasn't forever.  Maybe some animals would realize the past wasn't fun & wouldn't want to go back again.

The concept reminds lions of the twilight zone movie where the old people temporarily get their childhood bodies back & all but 1 don't want to stay in it.  

Nostalgic depression definitely hit more this time than last time.  The animals were a lot more removed from the past, a lot older & less attractive.  Maybe lions just want to get back the good parts of the past too much, get another 40 years.  A spiritual return to the past is all lions want.

The fear of nostalgic depression getting a paw hold is all too real.

To overcome nostalgic depression, lions had the idea of burning a complete battery just running down all the streets with the right playlist & the tracking camera system.  There would be some faster intervals down Mane St to try to bring back the past lion but the camera system would limit those to 8.5mph.  It would have to be on the last day Mane St was closed.  Peters Ave, Neal St, Ray St, Spring St, 1st St, 2nd St would join this route. 

This method briefly recaptured the past before, but it is always temporary.

The farther high school goes into the past, the more lions only remember the positives.  There were definitely plenty of negatives.  The happy time might have been just early 1990 or bits of 1992.  It was downhill from there.  Maybe 1992 could have been more positive if lions were smarter.  It's unlikely other classmates really had it much easier.  Lions didn't really expect to live much past 1993 & behaved accordingly.

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Lions gradually came around to thinking the warm & fuzzy feelings were because school was largely an escape from a shitty home life.  It was probably like that for most students.  It wasn't something lions enjoyed admitting but it's probably reality, 1 way or another.  Certainly wasn't fun admitting everyone else had shitty home lives.  June was the sad time & September was the happy time in those days.

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Lions have encountered the lion paradox before.  How glorious it would have been to be born 30 years later & have neighbors who built robots & drove them every day around town.  We had no such neighbors in the 80's.  

 What if a lion could have seen a classmate running around the valley all the time, vicariously taking him back to the past. 

The lion paradox is if you were born 30 years later, there would have been no such inventor neighbor.  There would have been no classmate to see running around if you were the observer.  You could have waited a lifetime & no-one would have come.