Arranging Bones
Drove around the city of my youth yesterday. Never made it to downtown Houston, but I covered a fair bit of its land as I visited children and doctors. A lot of freeway construction is now finished, and the roads are in that blessed state where they are comfortable for the current loads. Growth rates pushing 20%, however, will clog them soon enough.
It still feels a little odd to drive down Interstate 10 on the west side of town and know it was once Highway 90 with stoplights, and I could walk across it to get to high school from my little neighborhood just across the tracks. It would be a perilous journey to make on foot these days, although I suppose one could always try. Even I gave it up when I made friends with a young man who owned a car and offered me a ride.
A lot of my life these days is spent navigating memories. Nothing new for anyone who has lived long enough or lived at all really. Memories are the skeletons of our lives, the things that build the present. Some are good, some are bad, and some are nothing really at all. And interesting enough, with perspective, they move around. What was once bad becomes nothing and vice versa. I think a lot of that decision making is driven by what sort of life we want now and what sort of peace we’re after, if we’re really after peace, as we arrange the bones of our past and keep on going.