Memory Lane

If I count, I went to 8 schools between elementary and high school... spread all over Canada... nearly coast to coast.
Today, on a lark, I used google map satellite to look up old addresses from the ages of 5 to 14...
I never really spent enough  time at one place to really set roots, so I never really did.
Stranger in a strange land perhaps, but I think that if it didn't largely shape who I became, it at least heightened what was always there.
Looking at a tiny street from above, where I spent a few years as a child, immediately caused a deep odd sense of nostalgia... but not really nostalgia so much a flood of memories, not particularly idealized. Scrolling around the screen from street to street, memories flooded back, nicknames, hangouts, schools...
Moments later I jetted off to another part of the country for a different set. Odd, powerful, distant, near- All of it at once. Things I completely forget came back, looking at that odd over-head google-view. I suddenly recalled addresses, phone numbers, names... things I was sure I had forgotten...
"Where did I live in Edmonton?"
...silence... but suddenly... "104A st and 48A ave".
wow.
It was a moving experience.

I've done this once live. Before moving to the US I lived in Ontario... when I was 19yrs old I took a road trip across the country, westward, and actually visited one of those old neighborhoods. In person, it was very different- much more surreal- like the I never lived there, just some ghost of me had. I wrote about it when it happened and will see if I can find that... but the google-version was different because I didn't get hung up in the visceral actuality of the trees, the street-signs, the stores, the old fences... the google-walk down memory lane linked into a deeper memory bank without being engulfed by the fog of "time-now" vs "time-then". Not better, just different. Astonishingly so.

So yay for technology, and for the luxury of being to walk down memory lane by flying overhead.