Do you ever drive by a corner, a usual corner, a place you never gave more than a cursory glance, until suddenly there's a Starbucks where there wasn't one before.
You're surprised and then annoyed but rally back to disappointed before the light turns green and your mind is on to other things.
Have you seen a picture of your high school lately? Mine looks frighteningly like it did when I left in 1969... and that's a long time ago. I can't decided whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
Trying to remember the name of a street on my college campus, I brought up a map on the interwebs. I knew the intersection, but that was about all that was familiar. I can't do the Alumni Magazine's trivia contest; there are decades of buildings post-dating my time there.
There are places that are frozen in time for me. The driveway at my parents' house, our Chicago backyard from the dining room window after a snowstorm, my lily garden in the courtyard of our big house in Marin..... it took a while to type that......... I spent some quality time in each of those places before I returned to the keyboard.
I accept the inevitability of the passage of time. There are some things, though, that are sacrosanct. I'm not sure I want to revisit those frozen in time spaces any more. I like them just they way they are.
Some time ago I visited the town where I was born, the house that I remember. Some things were exactly the same but there were also some big changes -- at least from how I see them in memory. I tried to find my grandparents' but it was torn down for highway construction and absolutely nothing in that town looked familiar. It left me slightly sad.
ReplyDeleteThat's the exact right phrase - slightly sad.
Deletea/b
In September, I returned to the junior college I attended in the early '70s, and revisited several old haunts on the way there. Well, I say "old haunts" but they're all -- including the junior college -- more like dim memories at this point.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, maybe my favorite among the answers I've provided to Quora questions over the years is this one -- the question being, "What does the expression 'you can never go home again' mean? Have you experienced this in your life?"
https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-expression-you-can-never-go-home-again-mean-Have-you-experienced-this-in-your-life/answer/John-E.-Simpson