Déjà Vu and Two-Way Rivers

[mallorys_camera]

Last night, I think I must have dreamed about that game I used to play when I was a little girl because I woke up with the most profound sense of déjà vu…

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I had this marble collection when I was a little girl. I don’t remember where the marbles came from. Presumably I found them in the hideous, mold-infested basement of the House of Usher, which would date them to the 1930s or so.

(That same basement was also stocked with ancient, decaying volumes of a children’s encyclopedia called The Book of Knowledge, printed in 1912, which I devoured cover to cover and which doubtless is responsible for my strange antiquarian view of the world. You are what you read as a kid!)

Anyway, the game I played with these marbles consisted of imagining each one was a person with a complex dynastic history.

Sometimes I would brood over the dynastic history of a particular marble for days and days and days.

“This one lived in a time when there were no cars!” I would think. “In a kind of hut in the middle of a forest. And when guards came to make him go to war, he ran away, and they shot him in the back with an arrow. He had a baby. She grew up to –“ Endless iterations of begats! All of them marbles! The nineteen great-grand of the first marble lives where there are palm trees and is inventing a machine that will kill all the bees –

Seriously! That was the game.

And to this day, I sometimes have a hard time reading current events or meeting certain people. I think, But I imagined this, I imagined you, when I was seven years old!

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In other news, getting old sucks in more ways than you can ever imagine when you are young – although, of course, why would you waste your time imagining when there are so many more interesting things to think about?

One of the suckiest things is that one by one, the warranty on all your parts expire. And you know what happens the moment warranties expire!

My particular variant of the autoimmune disease has an arthritic component, and for the past few days, I’ve been struggling with that.

Like yesterday, I could barely walk.

This didn’t stop me from undertaking a forced march – three miles there and back – across the Walkway. What good is having a body if you can’t subject it to constant mortification, right?

Now, the Hudson isn’t actually a river. It’s an estuary.

And that means that while most of the time, the Hudson flows north to south, when the tides are high, the Hudson flows south to north.

And the tides are high right now, gearing up for that once-in-a-blue-moon tomorrow.

So the ice flows were all traveling the wrong way! They were moving upriver.

Which was just a very strange effect. Unsettling to an extreme!

Though I was the only person who appeared to be noticing it.