It’s been many years since I moved from Idaho to the East and eventually ending up here in North Carolina.  And I had lived, since childhood, in Idaho primarily in one town.  Calculated roughly, I believe I spent about 235 thousand waking hours in my hometown, so the vast bulk of my memories naturally would be rooted there.

But since leaving Idaho, my memories have presented me with an odd phenomenon, and here is what I mean:  Now first of all, let me say that I don’t think about my hometown in Idaho very often.  I live life in the present most of the time.  But there are moments when my thoughts do return to the town where I grew up, just sort of out of the blue.  I’m sure this is quite common for most folks.  But the phenomenon part of this experience, in my case, is where these random thoughts of mine return when they do, in a sense, go home.

Strangely, they don’t return to the homes where my family lived when I was a child or later when I had my own children, nor to the churches where I spent so many hours, nor to the schools or to friends’ homes or to the rivers that played such an important role in my life during all of those years.  No, my thoughts don’t return to any of these important places when they casually pop into my head.  Instead, they land me on sidewalks, next to streets where nothing ever happened except that I walked past these places on my way somewhere else.  In all, there are only three, perhaps four, of these places.

One of them is a place I walked past almost every day during the school year when my family first moved to Idaho because it was on my way home from school.  Walking to school, I took a different route so did not pass this particular spot, but on my way home I did.  I attended that school for three years.

This place was located about a block west of the school, against a tall chain link fence which enclosed the high school’s football or baseball field (depending on the time of year).  My brothers and I had watched many football and baseball games through that fence because we didn’t usually have the money for a ticket.  But where we watched the games was at a different corner of the yard altogether than the place I always remember.  Literally, the only thing that ever happened at that particular spot, near the street corner, toward the end of the fence, is that I walked past it many times during the first three years I lived in that town.  No fights, no first kisses, no car accidents, no money found on the sidewalk; nothing of importance that would register a memory ever happened on that spot.  I always walked past it alone and in a hurry to get home, yet my mind finds it memorable for some unknown reason.

There are a couple of other such places in the same town which my mind remembers at random times, also, and none has any more significance than I once passed it while walking.  I wonder sometimes if these memories have something to do with a past life in which some element of it keeps seeping through my unconscious mind, into my memory.  I don’t really know.