My life has been crowded with incident.

So much so that even now that I have settled down to live in the same town for what is at last more than half my life, one thing leads to another in my thoughts, off in all directions. When I walk past a certain blue house at Grant & Adams, on the shortcut from Park to Monroe St, it reminds me of how I sat after Thanksgiving dinner in that dining room when I was 18, and entertained the party for an eternal moment as the father, a historian, asked me for more detail and prompted me to continue the account I had begun in answer to the simple question of how I had gotten to Madison from my birthplace. When I drive by, I have to hold the memory in reserve. My local hippie boyfriend had taken me to that Thanksgiving dinner with the family of his heart, from his years at West High School. No one had ever listened to me tell the whole thing through, so until then I had only my private grandiose suspicions that I even had a story. My spouse can still be surprised by things I recall, places and events I can tell of that he has never heard.

Likewise, every time I drive past the Shopiere Road exit near Beloit, on the interstate south to Chicago, it reminds me of a colorful story from my far too interesting past, 1983 or so. Once I entertained a friend as we drove back to Madison with the tale, and a few months later on the bus to O’Hare I wrote it all out, but I am still looking for those notes. Oh look! Here they are buried in a 2001-2005 travel notebook, from when I was last on my way to Potlatch in San Francisco. Hyperlink should go here.

Already behind, well into the first week of January 2008, in the middle of my life, and seeming lost in the middle of wood, that Thanksgiving dinner seems as good a mark as any from which to begin. Unlike the Red Queen, I do not run as twice as fast to make progress, but plod along as usual. The nature of my medium will pile each episode onto the last to scroll into a structure like that movie Memento, a series of forward-moving sentences that leads to the beginning of the previous, or last, depending on how you look at it. For the amusement of my friends, I will attempt to recount some of the story of how I arrived here.