I am sitting in my livingroom and staring in front of myself. A candle is burning next to me. It is quite late in the day, and I will go for my evening ablutions pretty soon. My mind is blank. Out of the blue, I see the concrete columns lining the street of the apartment building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in which I lived between 1983 and 1990. And the address pops up in my mind: 872 Massachusetts Avenue. I open the laptop on the dining table in front of me, click my Safari browser, and google the address. The map of Cambridge appears in a jiffy, and there is a small picture of the concrete columns in the upper left corner. The apartment building with its eight floors towers above them. I click it, and it picture spreads over the entire screen of the laptop. It looks exactly as it looked when I left it twenty-five years ago. The photograph can be scrawled, and I scrawl it to the right. Soon I am looking at the little gray house where I lived from 1970 and 1975. One more time, the address pops up in front of me: 898 Massachusetts Avenue. I click the bookmarks on top of the screen, click my Residua website, and search for the two addresses. The piece with the full list of all the addresses where I have ever lived appears on the screen in no time (“So-and-So Lived Here…,” May 3, 1994). Both addresses and the years I lived there are staring at me. I shake my head, click off the browser, and close my laptop. Why in the world did those concrete columns suddenly appear in my mind’s eye? How could I remember these addresses after so many years? Forget it! The brain’s shenanigans will escape us forever.

Addendum (May 15, 2015)

This morning I googled all the other addresses where I used to live over nearly seventy years, and all the maps I found came with pictures that could be scrawled up and down the street. All except one, that is. My present address in Motovun comes without a picture. Enterprising as Google’s teams have been, so far they have missed the two main streets in the medieval town. I was stunned by so many pictures taken in Zagreb, Belgrade, Cambridge, Ljubljana, Reading, and London, but I was delighted by the absence of pictures in Motovun. The right place to live, or what?!