Blogging A – Z Challenge 2022: P is for Past Places or From Melancholy to Sublime

Herb’s Blog, Herbdate 22716 – 966

Here’s the haps:

Award-Winning blogger, Bruce Goldman over at Weave A Web did a post the other day that captured my imagination. His blog contains many stories that have caused me to call him “The O. Henry of the Dark Side” and posts about his life, his original musical compositions, and his original poetry. His recent post, 2400. A Country Bumpkin contained Google Maps pictures of places he grew up and lived in New Zealand which got me wondering if I could do something similar.

As I started out doing this I realized it was easier said than done for me. I guess places brought back memories and I sort of daydreamed/daymared and didn’t get real far. I did find a few pictures and gleaned some things from Google Maps but when I looked at the house in Milwaukee that I can remember the best I kind of felt creeped out. Upstairs was the room I shared with my brother. That front room is where I watched Neil Armstrong step on the moon.

I don’t know if I was creeped out to think about all of the lives that must have passed through there besides ours or if I felt guilty, kind of voyeuristic, looking at it. It sounds like a stupid thing to say as I write it out loud because anyone can find the same thing with a few clicks but…I don’t know. It was weird.

I don’t think I was prepared mentally or emotionally to do this. I was hit with a shockwave of melancholy when I looked for my grandparent’s house. I knew nobody has stayed there for a long time but I still wasn’t ready for finding nothing at all.

Nothing there visible at all. Oh, the place should have been torn down many years ago but to look at it was kind of a sense of loss. Not surprise or shock, just loss. The gravel road is not even there anymore.

I really don’t like leaving a post on a melancholy note. I have written somber and serious posts before but it’s not the same thing. So now, I want to shake off this mood and turn this post around and it won’t be hard, really. I have a lot to be thankful for and have seen a lot of awesome things and hope to see a lot more. So many good and wonderful things have happened to me in my life I wouldn’t be able to list them all even if I could remember them all. No, I’ve got it good. I’m not wealthy but I have plenty of food and a house I like that is useful. A great and loving family. I’m not only happy, more importantly, I’m content and at peace. I have had a good and blessed life so far and with God’s help, I hope to keep on for some time to come.

Thank you all for reading, I have a lot of great readers I am thankful for, too.

22 Comments

  1. It was fascinating to read of your experience Herb. – I knew before what my sites looked like as I go passed them every year or so – so there was no shock or surprise.

  2. I drove back to my hometown about 7 years ago. I was filled with so many different emotions as I drove past many places I frequented as a child. Awesome post Herb 😁

  3. The tiny 2-bedroom 1940s-era house in the Chicago suburbs where I grew up was demolished some years ago to be replaced by a McMansion. If I’d had a happy childhood, it would have bothered me, but as it was, I felt nothing.

    Amazingly, the much older two-story brick house where my grandparents lived in Chicago is still there, along with all of the surrounding houses. The neighborhood still looks as I remember it from my childhood in the 1960s, all of the houses and yards neat and tidy and well-maintained. Many old neighborhoods in the city have gone down the tubes over the years as a result of crime and neglect and so on, but my grandparents’ old neighborhood lives on.

  4. I know what you mean. We all know we won’t be around forever -but lately, people dying is so weird for me. They just step out of life and their house and car and e-mail account just aren’t theirs anymore.

  5. It had never occurred to me to run old addresses in Google Street View. Now I need to. I will probably get similar feelings.

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