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This weekend I had an absolutely wonderful visit in the 'burbs of Boston with longtime LJ-friend ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dietrich and the love of her life imlad; much drinking, scrutinzing of the inscrutable, and all-around merriment ensued. I also dropped off some illustration samples with a fantasy gallery in the nearby town of Burlington in the hopes of attracting a publisher or ten.
However this weekend was also significant to me as it involved a return to my childhood hometown: Arlington. Was very eerie to be driving up and down Massachusetts Avenue past old and extremely familiar landmarks. Virtually all of the storefront names are of course greatly changed from the last time I was in that town (1986), but those are about the only differences. The streets of my old neighborhood remain as they always have, the exterior paint color of the house where I spent my first 16 years, the grounds of my old elementary school are exactly as I remember them, even the strangely peaceful atmosphere of my old church were very familiar. Of course there's nobody left in the town that I knew or cared about much, yet the locale was quite haunting. I made not a single wrong turn the entire time I was there; it was reassuring to know my teenage sense of recall wasn't playing me false half a lifetime later.
(Ironic that there was an honest-to-goodness time-travellers' gathering in Cambridge that same evening; this particular time traveller only missed it by one town over.)
Anyways: can memory energies be poured into a physical location with such intensity that they remain, able to be called up again at will, even though the actual personalities who put them there are long since gone? I'd be skeptical but for the fact that one of the most rational, logic-worshipping people I know has experienced distinctive memories of deceased soldiers on a Civil War battle site.
Thoughts? Or is this just woo-woo stuff and I need to get a freakin' life?
dietrich and the love of her life imlad; much drinking, scrutinzing of the inscrutable, and all-around merriment ensued. I also dropped off some illustration samples with a fantasy gallery in the nearby town of Burlington in the hopes of attracting a publisher or ten.However this weekend was also significant to me as it involved a return to my childhood hometown: Arlington. Was very eerie to be driving up and down Massachusetts Avenue past old and extremely familiar landmarks. Virtually all of the storefront names are of course greatly changed from the last time I was in that town (1986), but those are about the only differences. The streets of my old neighborhood remain as they always have, the exterior paint color of the house where I spent my first 16 years, the grounds of my old elementary school are exactly as I remember them, even the strangely peaceful atmosphere of my old church were very familiar. Of course there's nobody left in the town that I knew or cared about much, yet the locale was quite haunting. I made not a single wrong turn the entire time I was there; it was reassuring to know my teenage sense of recall wasn't playing me false half a lifetime later.
(Ironic that there was an honest-to-goodness time-travellers' gathering in Cambridge that same evening; this particular time traveller only missed it by one town over.)
Anyways: can memory energies be poured into a physical location with such intensity that they remain, able to be called up again at will, even though the actual personalities who put them there are long since gone? I'd be skeptical but for the fact that one of the most rational, logic-worshipping people I know has experienced distinctive memories of deceased soldiers on a Civil War battle site.
Thoughts? Or is this just woo-woo stuff and I need to get a freakin' life?
