No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.

I often remember a scene in south Louisiana, a generic view of the bayou near where I grew up, clearly in the fall or winter time since the sugar cane fields in my mind are brown and already harvested. Although the location is often different upon each recall, the scene is usually an area familiar to me; so much so that, if you challenged me, I could find it on a map.

Although I haven’t realized the common stimulus, something triggers this recycled memory three or four times a year. I can remember its generation in my mind over the course of probably twenty years, and I’ve tracked its evolution. When I was thirty, just after moving to Chicago, it used to make me a little homesick; remembering that scene made me miss my mom after I got used to the cold north and out-grew living in the heat of that area. But, today I realize that I feel nothing emotional about that place, or its memory, which is now so generic in nature that it feels like simple, basic recall — you could ask me to think of the color green and I would feel the same way about the logic of that thought process.

It seems strange to me that now I feel nothing for this old memory, or about my past. According to the way I used to think, I should have some kind of emotional connection to the place where I grew up. For nearly ninety years my family have lived there in south Louisiana, and I am only seventeen years removed — so shouldn’t I have a romantic attachment?

But then again, I really don’t feel a connection any-where, or to any time: riding my Big Wheel in the street by our house; fireworks in the cane fields; the day my aunt died — they all just seem like arbitrary scenes, to the point that I confuse them with imagined scenes from books I have read.