January 7, 2019:

I wonder if she was surprised that the first drive I wanted to take in our brand-new canary yellow '68 Chevy Nova was to our old neighborhood, from before we'd moved.

You'd think it would have been obvious to any moderately observant observer that the move had unsettled me. I felt rootless, and I felt torn away from the friends I'd loved so much.

But she was never at any time an observant observer. She lived in her head, and, instead of paying attention, she projected her own experience onto her child.

She'd been moved many many times in childhood. She'd had no close attachments at all, even in adulthood no particularly close ones, aside from the fantasy family who'd appeared from thin air. At one time she'd had a bestie who was in fact the rationale for our move: so they could be closer. But they'd quarreled and that was long gone.

She simply didn't believe that children formed lasting bonds. 'Cos, she hadn't.

But I had, so that every opportunity to return to my personal point of origin was welcomed and seized upon.

Sadly, I never did manage to bump into any of those friends, when I returned to the old neighborhood. The odds were against it after all. I never saw any of them again, not one. But I think of them frequently, to this day.