Does this happen to you? Share your "intersection"

I've been playing with an early Christmas present: an AudioTechnica turntable with line-in input for ripping lp albums. I haven't listened to those for over a dozen years. What a blast from the past. Memories come tumbling back.

Whatever the source, radio, platters, CDs, downloads, or even live singing/playing, music tickles neurons and synapses language and thinking seldom touch.

You know, I do drive down neighborhoods I used to live in. I like how they bring things to the forefront--yeah, the other senses kick in, too, as I try to drive not so slowly that I look like a stalker (a stalker of memories, yes--but isn't that hard to admit, sometimes?) and relive the times my drunk neighbor addressed his lightpost every evening and swore at it if it so much as looked at him the wrong way.

There's something comforting about visiting and remembering and having a touchstone--a real thing that lets you hope more that it wasn't all just a dream, eh?

I went back 'home' four years ago after being gone for 25 years, and purposely rode down to where the old pavillion stood--where we played bingo and I used to run the register while my mom ran the grill--and it was gone. It made me cry. It had two huge old trees that grew up right through the center of it, and even those were gone.

And the people who bought the house I used to live in turned my bedroom into an entry foyer.

Shwebb said:

I try to drive not so slowly that I look like a stalker (a stalker of memories, yes--but isn't that hard to admit, sometimes?)

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LOL.

I do the exact same thing.

I now live some distance away from my old town, but when visiting friends and family I'll often take a drive around the housing estate where I grew up.

It all looks so much duller and darker, smaller too.

Long streets that as a child seemed to stretch for miles, but are really only a short walk. Streets that I recall as being overun with kids, now empty and quiet.

But yeah, curtains might twitch at the sight of a slow moving car, and like you I speed on past and try to absorb what I can in the process.

Reminds me of an old Kinks song..."The day they knocked down the palace, my sister stood and cried. The day they knocked down the palace, part of my childhood died, just died."

That stupid song makes ME cry.

Daehota

I dream often of places and people from the past and when I wake in the morning, I'm usually laughing (rarely) or crying (often). That stuff sticks with a person for the rest of the day, too.

Daehota

Revisiting depends on what's changed

Thanks for sharing, Jennifer. Visiting a place where you were 6 years ago is different from visiting one from 30 years ago. I tried recapturing some of the memories I had when I lived in Berkeley California in 1969, (yes, that 1969), and when I went back in the early 90's it had changed so much I felt depressed. It didn't help my memories at all.

I recently saw a remarkable documentary about going back, called "Long Time Coming" by Kartemquin films, in which some Vietnam vets joined a cycling team to ride from Hanoi to Saigon, many of them in handbikes because their legs were gone. The team was split between Americans and Vietnamese riders. It was an astonishing ride down memory lane. A case where the present reality was ever so much better than the older one.

Memoirs are one of the craziest forms of time travel. Who needs science fiction when you can do this stuff?

Jerry

I live about 45 minutes from where I grew up, so for me this is easy.

The house looks different, because my mother isn't there and my dad has a new wife, but the basement floor still has the gouge where I broke the wheelbarrow pushing my little brother around in circles; the old tire swing is still hanging between the biggest 2 pines out back; and all the trails we followed in the fields behind the house are still there. I have a harder time finding it these days, but the magic never left.

Shwebb said:

I try to drive not so slowly that I look like a stalker

Click to expand...

Just this past summer, I was driving by the house that I lived in about 55 years ago. The neighborhood was very run-down, and this particular house was featured by photo in a local newspaper article about the city demolishing the neighborhood to build new low-cost housing (yes, I did grow up on the "po' side of town"). I stopped my car in the street to take a picture of the house, and a woman in an upstairs window started yelling at me and threatening to call the police because I was photographing her house and children! It was with some trepidation (given the type of neighborhood that it had become) that I stopped and explained to her that my great-grandfather had owned the 3-story, 3-flat house, and my grandfather's family, my father's family, and my family had lived there more than 50 years ago. I guess she must have believed me; at least no cops tracked me down.