with old memories
April 20, 2010 (Tuesday)
On Saturday afternoon I decided to try out a Target store 3.7 miles from this house. I drove there without getting on a freeway, even though the store is more or less on the south side of I10. I enjoyed shopping in the big new store. While there, I didn’t know that I was so near a few things that are of interest to me.
For instance, I didn’t know that just south of the store are the sculptures of presidents recently removed from foreclosed land on Highway 288 near Pearland. I looked over to my left as I drove up to the Target parking lot on Spring Street and saw what looked like giant statues. So when I got back home I looked at the satellite map and saw that the big sculptures and their bases were on the grounds very near the store.
While looking at the map, I also discovered that the store in which I was admiring new things was only 6 blocks from where I lived for a while with my Grandma Fake when I was in the ninth grade. While in the store, I had no idea I was so near something so familiar.
Next time I go to that Target store, I’ll feel more at home and not so much a stranger.
Crockett Street is near the store, and if you follow it east, it becomes Hogan and then becomes Lorraine. One summer my sisters and I lived with my mother in an apartment house near the Shipley donut bakery on Crockett and Houston Avenue. I’ll always remember the aroma of the baking of those donuts. Keep going on Crockett and after it becomes Hogan you’ll pass my old girlfriend’s house and nearby the Trinity Baptist Church where I spoke one time to a youth group when I was their age. Keep going and on Lorraine you will pass the house I lived in for two years when I was in the sixth and seventh grades, close to the houses I lived in when in the fifth grade, and on a few more blocks and you’ll come near the house where my twin sisters were born. When you hit a dead end at Jensen turn left and shortly you will get to Liberty Road and the church that changed my life by leading me to Christ. One street over is where I was born. I left Houston in 1949 and didn’t move back until 2004, but it’s full of old memories.