HAPPY ANNIVERSARY...

Sunday was sort of an anniversary for me, in that it was 48 years ago that I first moved into the house in which I now reside.  (Not the one above, which is just for illustration purposes.)  June 14th 1972, which was a Wednesday, though we should actually have flitted on Monday 12th, which was when our official tenancy commencement date took effect.  I presume it was arranging removal vans for both properties (it was a mutual exchange) on the same day which accounts for the hold-up.  We lived here for 11 years before moving to another house in another neighbourhood, where we lived for just over 4 years, before moving back to this one. Regular, long-term readers of my other blog already know all this, of course, having read it (too) many times before in previous posts.

48 years, eh?  How can that be possible?  I don't even feel like I'm 48, so how can I have moved into this house that same length of time ago?  I've pondered before about how staying in the same place you've lived since you were 13 up into advanced adulthood can make your teenage years seem closer to you and not so far distant, but that can have its drawbacks as well as its advantages.  You see, when the gap between 13 and 60-plus seems like the blink of an eye through one end of Time's telescope, it likewise seems the same from the other - moreso when all those years have been lived in the same house.

Under normal circumstances, most people will have lived in a number of houses and neighbourhoods (even countries in some cases) between youth and their later years, so there have been regular interruptions in continuity to distinguish the different events over the course of their lives.  Add to that different jobs, relation-ships, marriage, kids and grandkids, and there are numerous signposts to measure how things have unfolded over the years.  That doesn't really apply in my case. With the exception of that 4 year blip, my life is pretty much the same as it's always been since I was a youth, making 48 years feel like one big 'now' as opposed to a collection of various little 'then's.

To someone else, 48 years ago may seem like an eternity away, due to the fact that they've crammed multiple and varied experiences into their life, whereas, to someone like me, who hasn't, 48 years doesn't feel like being very long ago at all. (Well, sometimes it does - depends on how I'm feeling I suppose.)  How does it feel for you, if you're old enough to encompass 48 years into your span thus far?  Was it a 'forever' ago, or does it appear much more recent than that?

I've always derived a certain measure of comfort from obtaining comics, books and toys (and houses?) I had as a kid, because then the time in which I originally owned them doesn't seem that far away.  However, perhaps things from our past belong in the past and should stay there so that we have a more realistic concept of the passage of time.  When too many items from the past also form our present, the span between them seems almost non-existent, resulting in the illusion that we've gone from child to pensioner faster than a fart from The Flash!  (Hey, I just had to squeeze that in somewhere.)  

Another 'anniversary' is looming, in that on August 1st I'll have been back in this house for 33 years.  The official tenancy commencement date was August 4th 1987, which was a Tuesday, so we moved in early this time, on the Saturday. Funnily enough, this August 1st will also be a Saturday, so I suppose things have come full circle. I've now been back for 33 years, but, despite being exactly 3 times the duration of my first term of 11 years in the '70s and early '80s, it seems nowhere near as long. I don't think I'll ever be able to get my head around paradoxes like that.

Anyway, I know this post has been another extremely self-indulgent wallow in personal nostalgia, but if you'd like to comment on my meandering musings, feel free to do so - you know where.