Trying to find that confounded address
Blame it on the food you had for supper. Blame it on the book you were reading just before curfew. From time to time, you will wake from that precious slumber, hours before the scheduled moment, and you will lie there thinking about things that are, as my kids say, “Pas rapport!”
Last night, which is somewhere between last evening and this morning if you’re constructing a timeline, I found myself wondering about where exactly I was living back in 1977. A very good year, in passing; I had my second, freshly printed paper version degree from my favourite university. I had plans. I had debts. A member of the consumer society. And, alas, I had no fixed abode.
For a period that covered several weeks, my address consisted of a post office box. Not particularly roomy, either. I couldn’t stretch out inside, or have friends over for coffee and cheese cake. In short, my housing status was subject to change. Technically I wasn’t “homeless”, because there was still a bed back with the parents, but they were a paltry (look it up, make it your word for the day) two weeks away by bicycle; somewhat less by other, commercial means of conveyance.
This wasn’t a new experience; in fact, I was experienced from other years of living below the radar, but here I was educated (in debt) and ready for new challenges, if only an employer could contact me. The post office box was sufficient for governmental correspondence, only.
Anyhow, I decided to put my personal history in order, this morning. With a colour-accented table created in Excel, I put four decades into line, and discovered that while the first twenty years involved me, the rest involved me with responsibilities. Children. Although I can’t reproduce the table here, for lack of space, accept that I chose the fill shades appropriately. An effort faintly reminiscent of a scene from Alice’s Restaurant, where Officer Obie illustrated the story using “twenty-seven eight-by-ten colur glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was (sic)”
