Deja-vu all over again

There I am standing across the street from the little bungalow I lived in 25 years ago. I am not actually grimacing, but the wind was brisk and cold, which is normal in these parts.

A man is shuffling through some old papers in an upstairs bedroom, with no particular objective in mind. He picks up a sheaf, and a couple of items fall to the floor. They are cartoons. Cartoons drawn by a guy who had been a tenant of the adjoining house that the man also owned. He looked at them. He chuckled. They were cartoon birthday cards given to his late wife, who died back in 1994. The tenant had left, after having lived next door for a year, back in 1981. He thought no more about them.

Two hours later his front doorbell rang. He opened it. There was the man who had drawn those cartoons a quarter of a century earlier. I was the artist and I was face-to-face with my old landlord and neighbor. That he was thunderstruck, especially having just seen the cartoons is to state the case lightly. If you are cynical about synchronicity, this should still give you a point-to-ponder. It did for me.

The incident happened yesterday when I decided (after some prevarication of thought, and wondering if I really wanted to take that backward step in time) to plunge into the old ‘hood’ in Bradwell, a suburb of Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England. We stopped for lunch in my old ‘local’, the Sun Inn, and then walked up that old street that had once been so familiar, and remained virtually unchanged from when I lived there. It was a weird feeling, and I still don’t quite have my head around it. Probably won’t for weeks.

I was there with all that water having passed under a bridge, and a different wife in tow from the one he once knew, and yet it was a good reunion. We had a delightful afternoon with Richard (who would now be about 75, but was, like Bradwell, still virtually unchanged, except his hair was now snow-white. We had coffee with him, talked about his kids (who were teens then, but are now middle-aged), and his grandkids, and his lady-friend and the fact that even though he misses his wife, is having a good life.

I have never been to a school reunion, nor have I ever wanted to go to one, so I was apprehensive about this endeavour, believing that sleeping-dogs should be able to lie peacefully and, like Thomas Wolfe, knowing you can’t really go home again.

But, I did go ‘home’ again, even if it was just to a year-long home, and I am very happy that I did.