From October 1, 2006
The Context of Things Vanished

I was born in 1939, just before World War II.  Until she died when I was 16, I lived with my great-grandmother.  One early memory was a big double-sided, Victorian house. Where we lived until I was about three years old.  One of my daughters still lives in a suburb of he city.  A while back when I visited her we drove around to show her some of these places I remember from my own childhood.

I know that this house, this place, no longer exists, except in my memory.  And the context of that experience is gone forever, cemented under the concrete lanes of what is now referred to as “the Inner Loop.”

The roots of that context which I knew as a child have disappeared, and what it meant to me and to the people who lived there no longer has a basis in reality.  We can’t go home again.  So today we live in a world which is largely without context, without the rudder of where we came from, where we were.

Now there is only our present, and our memory.

   And that is why we treasure old photographs and write journals.  They are the  repository of the long-lost context of our lives.  They have a value beyond measure.