this imploding heart

My senior year of HS my roomies and I were hopscotching from apartment to apartment about once a month until we found the woodlocker. It was the upstairs portion of a building on the corner of main and broadway called the woodlacker because that was the business' name downstairs. We immediately dug the size of the place.. and other than the business downstars, we had no neighbors.. and they closed at five. I was also extremely fond of the building because of it's age, layout, and architecture... It was built in the early 1900's and later converted into offices upstairs, maintaining the store front downstairs and the smell was great.. it had old radiator style heaters in every room, two bathrooms, 5 bedrooms, an office, laundry room, a huge L shaped living room, and a long open room.. about three times the size as the bedrooms. Since the office transformation took place in the thirties-forties we had bird doors on top of each door and glass doorknobs still. We used to play racquetball in the long room and had all out BB gun wars throughout the house for about two months straight. Anyway, my point is.. going back to visit the place... I love to go alone and sit quietly. So many voices come back to me that I haven't heard in years.. laughter and crying. I like to stand where I once stood when the police kicked in the door and arrested a drunk guy with a gun (our roommate called them, we couldn't get him to leave and he had a pistol in his belt... he freaked out but before the cops showed up we had dissolved the situation to a bunch of guys drinking beer (underage)). I love to look out the windows and think back.. I can almost put myself there. It's amazing to think that there are millions of places that do to someone or another pretty much everywhere in the world... I need to see more.. I need to travel.

People talk about "institutional memory" the ability of non-corporeal organizations to have some sense of knowing their own history, but I agree that actual places seem to possess similar attributes.

That's one of the reasons I like living in older buildings, it's almost like the former inhabitants have left some scent of their presence, like a cat rubbing its cheek against your arm to mark you as something that belongs to it. Some people seem to be more sensitive to the vibe, or maybe its just that they have a keener appreciation for the history that still resonates between the walls of rooms.

The other thing I like to do is occasionally return to places I've lived before and just sit outside for a few moments trying to imagine what's occured in the years between when I lived there and now, and trying to feel that string as it connects into an unseeable future. Every once in a while I get an eerie feeling I'm not the only one doing this, like several Calabi-Yao spaces have suddenly converged somewhere in the 11th or 12 dimension, and I'm sharing a temporal connection with a young girl sitting in a Landau carriage, a elderly man in a Model T Ford, a newlywed couple in their Studebaker, me, and somebody in their hydrogen fuel-cell powered hovercar all staring at that same house just off Sandy Blvd. in Portland where one of us planted a walnut tree that the next one nurtured, and the next one pruned, and from which I picked up walnuts 30 years ago, that the next person in line will cut down in another 30 years or so.

Things have memories, but they can only be revealed to those willing to sit quietly and listen to the story told in the mites of dust and faded wallpaper, in the worn places in the carpet and hollows carved into the stairs by a million footsteps trod by a thousand different people who are all climbing the steps to kiss someone goodnight at the very same moment in an infinitely looping moebus strip of space-time.

YES!!

I've done nothing all day at work today but read blogs, and this was a queen Mother hugger of a post!!

Hell yeah - wipe out my eye-focals

Speaking of old memories.. how about the feeling of A:getting into an old car.. a.1) getting into an old car you have a history with... the strange familiarity of the space all together.
B: Selling/donating to the Breast Cancer Awareness Fund.. an old car you have a history with.. Just the thought of owning something as big as a car used to BLOW my mind. Taking out all of the seats and lawing on the empty floorboards.. thowing miscellaneous parts around like "Yeah, .... this is my headliner.." or "Well, you know... I never owned a wheel before but.. well, this is it... my wheel (in most cases you'd have four or five)."... It seemed so crazy to me. To finally own something that was way tooo complex for me to break apart and put back together on my bedroom floor. My very first combustion engine.... who really goes home from the VW dealer saying that?.. I guess mine was a radio controlled airplane (my first engine). .. it was a Cox.

GODDAMMITT! And excuse me for cussin' but -- some SOB actually DID cut down one of the walnut trees in front of my grandparent's old house in Portland! The carcass was still lying there on Saturday morning, chopped up like yesterday's Swiss steak, huge slabs the size of VW bugs lying on their sides next to the house.

I only hope the thing was diseased or something, because otherwise it's just a GD shame...