The Spaces Between The Mortar

There are places in our mind that do not tell a clear story when recalling details about our life as it unfolds. They are storage spaces, with small suitcases, tucked full of scraps of stories, of which we do not recall the whole content. I remember flash-backs of my childhood, and adult life, that come to me in muted colors, and in slow motion, and I remember being in those places, with the people I see, but I do not remember all the people I see, or remember all the places I shared the same space and time with those people with. I remember being with specific friends of my parents at a certain house, and I remember elaborate details of the kitchen in that house, and the equally elaborate hairdo of the lady of the house, and her big nose, but I do not remember who she was in relation to my parents and our friends. Who were these people and why do I remember them, from time to time? I was about 10 at the time. Once I moved to the USA, I remember places and families I visited in the course of my travels the first year I was here in 1976 at the end of that foreign exchange student year in Dallas, and traveling to Arkansas and Massachusetts, and spending an entire week with two different families, and I do not remember their names, or what I even did there, other than being a visiting student. I remember a very nice father and his teenage daughter in North Carolina, another state we visited, and as kind as they were to me, I do not remember their names, but I do remember them taking me to a very quiet diner, and I do remember the daughter playing basketball after school in her very quiet backyard. At times, their faces come back to me, in quiet flashes, and then they vanish again , for years at a time. I have the same experience with certain dreams. I have a dream I had when I was 11, where my brother and I take a rowboat ride on a very quiet pond , with a nun named Katrien, who was a teacher at my Catholic elementary school in Roeselare, Belgium, and who died young of a brain tumor. Once in a blue moon, with many years of space in between, I have the same exact dream, with all the same, quiet details. I have dreams of my sisters, and brother, and my parents, in these elaborate architectural spaces, and we get lost, and I have to find my way out, alone, with my father watching carefully over me from a distance, and years will go by, and I will have the exact same dream , with the exact same conflicts and conversations. Train stations were important to me at one point ,as I spent 3 years taking the train to school daily between the ages of 16 and 19. To this day, I often dream of trying to take the train home, and try and dial my hometown home phone number, 051 20 25 69, and not getting through, no matter how many times I try. Now that we have cell phones, I have the same dream, but I use my cell phone to try to get through, instead of a phone booth with change. It is like my mind has this extra space , where I keep extra albums, full of pictures, both of my waking hours and certain dreams, and they pop up at their convenience, it seems, more than at mine. They are familiar, if odd, and somehow they are a part of me, even if they make strange bed fellows, as I seem more a stranger in these re-enactments than the other actors and the spaces they share with me, time and again.