what i remember

My mind goes to strange places sometimes, for reasons I usually don't understand.

I don't mean strange in that the places are strange. I mean, I don't know why I am there. They repeat, like these little memory attractors, but there's nothing to find there. I get the feeling that there was something incomplete that happened, some kind of expectation that whatever was there might recur, and it never did, and that expectation was like a door left open, that can never close, and once in a while I just happen to wander by, and in I go.

I'll quickly note what brought me here, just now. Rearranging some computer code to plot some data. Wondering, how do I best approach this little model selection problem in python? I am not a great python programmer. I know how I'd do it in MATLAB, that's for sure. I only need to vary one parameter, the slope, since by design the means of the different conditions should be the same. Right? I should print them out just to be sure.

As this process is working through my head, I feel myself wandering with my friend Ian along the wooden boardwalks at Montgomery Bell State Park (I had to look it up just now to recall the name), near my hometown. We were 11 or 12. Ian's mother had brought us there, she was perusing an art fair set up on the boardwalks, Ian and I are just roaming, exploring the place. I remember the green-brown park service paint on the boards. It feels like it was autumn, maybe there were pine needles everywhere.

Why? I am I there? I have found myself back there over and over, just this brief recollection for no reason, no obvious connection to the current moment. Maybe because I've thought of Ian recently? A song stuck in my head that he suggested. I told the story, again, to some friend at Taekwondo of how I started as a kid - with Ian, who quit soon after I started, but I kept it up for many years, and still do, from decade to decade.

Why is that Saturday - I know it must have been a Saturday - at the park still lingering there, more than thirty years later? Why was that door left open?