It's funny how the past can reach into the future at a moments notice and, uninvited, snatch you away from the perception of now. Or at least replace one perception with another.
Just for a moment my senses confuse hot for cold and cold for hot as I open the back door of our house at midnight.
An icy blast of east Lancashire air, snaking down from the bleak moorland above hits the back of my neck and somehow is stiflingly hot, rather than pitifully cold. It is the kind of heat that Brits abroad know nothing about as they complain and redden beneath a Portuguese noonday sun: Oooh it's toowot f' me ere our Tommy. Ah couldn't live ere me y'know. S'alreet forra 'oliday. But ah couldn't live 'ere.
No. This is hotter than uncomfortable. It is more humid and unforgiving. It is sticky and warm as blood and suddenly I am back in West Michigan in the summer of 2007, standing on the back door step of the old split level on Jericho Road.
I can smell the cereal cooking over at the Post plant; I marvel at the deafening sound of Cicadas chirruping all around as though a hundred million of them live right inside my ear drums. Mostly though it is the falsehood of the heat, it is the momentary synaptic cock up that sends me hurtling backward in time to another place and another life, standing inside the body of another person and looking out into another night.
And as quickly as the past had stolen me, it just as sharply dumped me back on terrafirma. All of a sudden the hot air is cold again and my poor grey matter has found an even keel to cling to. But in that millisecond a thousand memories have invaded me. And how sad it all seems.
Did it really happen? Did I live one time in country so far removed from my own that I often, drunkenly, became confused about the distance between here and there. Didn't I want to call a cab one night, or borrow a bicycle to take me from a trailer park in Michigan to a street in Salford 6? Didn't I learn to drive in a ten year old Pontiac with dents up and down the side, and two hundred thousand miles of America under it's hood and on its clock? Didn't that sticky bloody heat almost make me faint when I stepped out of an Escalade at an apartment complex in Kalamazoo? Was any of that real?
Well of course it was. It was real as the raccoon in the yard I would feed hot dogs. It was real as the black girls on the bus chattering away like movie stars, or even the bus itself with the word 'downtown' announcing it's destination.
Downtown! The Downtown Bus!! How thrilled I was by that. How very American it all was. In England buses had numbers on the front. 26, or 464. They went 'into town'. Not downtown. Downtown was a cool place. Downtown was a place that had previously only existed in books about private detectives and films with Keanu Reeves. Downtown was more of an idea than anything else. And it was real. And I was there. Or at least somebody masquerading as me. Not the me I know now. But I was there in some form or other. A me in the making you might say.
How very odd that all of this should assault me for no reason. How strange that it should come and go so quickly because of a breeze, hot or cold or indifferent. And how very, very sad that I couldn't catch it by the tail and ride it for a moment or two longer. Or, maybe, never let go at all.
Goodnight.
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