16 June 2002
Time and Distance
20/06/02 20:29 Filed in: Personal
I was born in California. I don't remember any of
California, my folks moved to Texas for a short time.
Then back to California to have my sister, then back
to Texas before either of us could develop memories
of the west coast.
The first memory I have is of a wood-frame house in Waco. I remember standing at an exterior door, looking through the screen door watching it rain, thunder, and lightning outside. I also remember a bit of the awe that I felt at how big the outside world seemed to be.
Sometime later we moved to a different house after my mother divorced. This house was across the street from three little-league baseball fields. There was also what seemed to be a large area of wooded ground in which me, my sister, and my friends would play. I remember the distances involved as significant. I had a conversation with my sister recently that involved our travels as pre-teens, that our "stomping grounds" were bounded by certain roads... and that there seemed to be enough adventure for an entire lifetime in that area in which we wandered.
A few years ago, the owner of the "McGregor Road House" passed away and the estate sold the land on which the house sat. The houses, being wood-frame pier-and-beam construction, were picked up and moved elsewhere leaving the land open. Heather and I stopped to take a look after grass had reclaimed the ground where the houses sat. I have a very strong sense of spatial relationships, how things physically fit together, building mental maps based on observation, and generally being able to estimate distances and recall the "lay of the land" easily. In removing the houses, the contractor had left the trees intact which left me points of reference as to where the houses had been placed. Not to mention the fact that the ball fields still exist, providing even more visual references.
As I stood in the place where the front porch of the McGregor Road house used to exist I had one of those twists of perspective that I think we all encounter as we age. I realized just exactly how small this "place" seemed to be. Heather says its because I'm "larger" now than I was then, so naturally the place would seem smaller. I don't think that's it. Not entirely. There is, was, an unexplainable difference. The place was still as intimately familiar as any place in which I had lived for a great length of time... and I realize that time changes all things. But can time really make a place smaller?
One of the other reasons I stopped there is the memory of the "Eternal Ant Hill". The EAH was a large hill of those huge red ants that everyone here in the south seems to remember from their childhoods. This was an unusually large ant hill that never fell to me and my sister's machinations. We did pretty much everything we could think of to destroy this hill, hence the name. Water out of the garden hose over hours on end couldn't flood the thing out. Gasoline poured on, and lit couldn't flame the thing out. The EAH was as indestructible as something could be to our minds back then. After nearly 18 years away, I became curious to see if it still existed. It doesn't. I know I stood on the spot where it used to be, my spatial memory of this place has not diminished any, and the rest of the references were there. But the Eternal Ant Hill was gone.
One of the things that intrigues me, due to the strong spatial sense I am sure, is maps and navigation. I own four GPS receivers, numerous mapping programs, and can quickly find my place on a paper map from visual reference cues. Last nite while looking at street level detail maps of the Waco area I decided I'd zoom in on Woodway, and specifically the area that my sister and I had agreed were our self-imposed boundaries of wandering. Using the toolset in the mapping program I quickly realized that what we considered such a huge kingdom, what provided us hours of exploration and fun amounted to nothing more than a few square miles at most of land on which we roamed. From one corner to another was not even a mile-and-a-half wide. I was floored.
We all have the experience that physical things get smaller when they are physically further away. Do we all have the experience that places get smaller in our memory the further away we get from them in time? Granted, I know "more of the world" now than at any past time in my life. And I know those distances haven't changed in the intervening years, what has? I can only guess that my distance in time from that place has caused the same effect others might experience as when observing an object from a large physical distance.
Time and distance are interchangeable. I'm surprised to find out exactly how much at times!
The first memory I have is of a wood-frame house in Waco. I remember standing at an exterior door, looking through the screen door watching it rain, thunder, and lightning outside. I also remember a bit of the awe that I felt at how big the outside world seemed to be.
Sometime later we moved to a different house after my mother divorced. This house was across the street from three little-league baseball fields. There was also what seemed to be a large area of wooded ground in which me, my sister, and my friends would play. I remember the distances involved as significant. I had a conversation with my sister recently that involved our travels as pre-teens, that our "stomping grounds" were bounded by certain roads... and that there seemed to be enough adventure for an entire lifetime in that area in which we wandered.
A few years ago, the owner of the "McGregor Road House" passed away and the estate sold the land on which the house sat. The houses, being wood-frame pier-and-beam construction, were picked up and moved elsewhere leaving the land open. Heather and I stopped to take a look after grass had reclaimed the ground where the houses sat. I have a very strong sense of spatial relationships, how things physically fit together, building mental maps based on observation, and generally being able to estimate distances and recall the "lay of the land" easily. In removing the houses, the contractor had left the trees intact which left me points of reference as to where the houses had been placed. Not to mention the fact that the ball fields still exist, providing even more visual references.
As I stood in the place where the front porch of the McGregor Road house used to exist I had one of those twists of perspective that I think we all encounter as we age. I realized just exactly how small this "place" seemed to be. Heather says its because I'm "larger" now than I was then, so naturally the place would seem smaller. I don't think that's it. Not entirely. There is, was, an unexplainable difference. The place was still as intimately familiar as any place in which I had lived for a great length of time... and I realize that time changes all things. But can time really make a place smaller?
One of the other reasons I stopped there is the memory of the "Eternal Ant Hill". The EAH was a large hill of those huge red ants that everyone here in the south seems to remember from their childhoods. This was an unusually large ant hill that never fell to me and my sister's machinations. We did pretty much everything we could think of to destroy this hill, hence the name. Water out of the garden hose over hours on end couldn't flood the thing out. Gasoline poured on, and lit couldn't flame the thing out. The EAH was as indestructible as something could be to our minds back then. After nearly 18 years away, I became curious to see if it still existed. It doesn't. I know I stood on the spot where it used to be, my spatial memory of this place has not diminished any, and the rest of the references were there. But the Eternal Ant Hill was gone.
One of the things that intrigues me, due to the strong spatial sense I am sure, is maps and navigation. I own four GPS receivers, numerous mapping programs, and can quickly find my place on a paper map from visual reference cues. Last nite while looking at street level detail maps of the Waco area I decided I'd zoom in on Woodway, and specifically the area that my sister and I had agreed were our self-imposed boundaries of wandering. Using the toolset in the mapping program I quickly realized that what we considered such a huge kingdom, what provided us hours of exploration and fun amounted to nothing more than a few square miles at most of land on which we roamed. From one corner to another was not even a mile-and-a-half wide. I was floored.
We all have the experience that physical things get smaller when they are physically further away. Do we all have the experience that places get smaller in our memory the further away we get from them in time? Granted, I know "more of the world" now than at any past time in my life. And I know those distances haven't changed in the intervening years, what has? I can only guess that my distance in time from that place has caused the same effect others might experience as when observing an object from a large physical distance.
Time and distance are interchangeable. I'm surprised to find out exactly how much at times!