Three right angles took me to school, thanks to the1920s cartographers who, in their grid obsession, turned geography into geometry. I started school early; four. From the front gate, two hundred gently rising yards of cream and red brick houses crouched behind shrub and lawn, neat, ordered, tidy. Left turn. Fifty yards. Still a gentle ascent, fewer houses; bigger, quieter, somehow richer. Must have been the east-west orientation rather than my north-south. Right turn. Main road. Careful: Frank in my grade two class, who lived on this road, was knocked down here once. Never the same. Ran across desks, molten anger. (Alcoholic father didn’t help; much older lawyer brother the same. Mother was an angel; dark eyes uplifted in some kind of accepting grace behind which lurked an infinite sadness. Also, two beautiful flaxen-haired sisters like muted divas.) Twenty yards. Left turn. Thirty yards. School gate. Three right angles: a square peeled open into a zig-zag line on a map, as...
You think you saw something last week in the supermarket, and you look for it, and it isn't there. Must be out of stock, you think. Then you go home and google it, and find out it was discontinued in 2008. Nuts. But I saw it not a year or so ago. Maybe two. No, you didn’t. You haven’t seen it for seventeen years; maybe fifteen if you kept a pack in your cupboard going stale for a year or two. In that fifteen years other things happened. Children were born and grew. You bought some cars. Some relatives died. Others didn’t. The house leaked for two years until you got it fixed. The house across the road sold, thank God, the owner’s subwoofer had sent earthquake rumbles under the entire street. The parish priest died. Out-of-mind things come back as if they were there a minute ago, popping out of some elusive brain cul-de-sac, like a handkerchief in the pocket of an old coat you haven’t worn since last winter. Pro-Vita Weat-Harts: white pack, single ear of wheat graphic in ochre sil...