Housekeeping

It’s been a while since I checked in, but things have been pretty quiet for a change. In fact, we just celebrated our first year of living in peace and quiet after escaping from Crazy Neighbor Land. Go us!

Just to give you an idea of how organized I strive to be, I’ve always tried to keep a record of my old addresses and phone numbers. (This actually came in handy when we ended up going back to renting, because I still had the contact info for our last landlord, from 2004.) The list was always in my Palm contacts list, but when I migrated over to Android and Google Contacts last month, things aren’t really arranged the way I like. I don’t really need my apartment info from 1992 to come up in my main phone list, you know? So I’ve been revisiting the data and plugging it into a simple text file that I can stow someplace out of the way.

Well, as you can imagine, I’ve been struck by a serious wave of nostalgia as I look through those old addresses. I have them all the way back to the first years of Swami and Fang, when we lived in a crappy place about ten minutes’ drive from campus in Williamsburg. To confirm the address, I even tracked down the website for the apartment complex and took a look at the Google satellite view. It’s amazing to think how many people have lived in that unit since we jammed our stuff into the Hyundai and the rental truck and drove off in 1992. I sure hope they’ve replaced the carpet since then. Oh, and fixed the lamp that was broken while someone was practicing his golf swing indoors.

Eighteen years have passed and we’ve lived in seven more places since then. I know a lot more than I did then, about all kinds of things. I also have a better idea of exactly how little I still know, even after all that time. But the one constant is that everything I’ve learned is colored by wherever I lived at the time.

When I try to visualize a life’s experiences, my first impulse is to picture a road, with the way behind spread over flat terrain with long views, and the way ahead a steep hill that you can’t see over. But I’m not sure it’s really like that. Things that happened a long time ago often feel immediate and can easily provoke a visceral reaction. As I think about that first apartment I can almost feel myself living there right now, even though it’s so far removed in time. So maybe memory and experience is more like one of those rooms full of churning plastic balls, where you have no idea which ball is going to surface in front of you next. And something is constantly handing you more balls to add to the pile. Hmm. I think I just suggested that we’re all trapped inside a giant McDonald’s Playland! That might explain a few things.