I’m driving down Highway 101 in California, from Palo Alto to Sunnyvale; no more than ten miles. The highway is full of cars driving seventy miles an hour; the lights are blinding.
This calls up memories of Virginia in the 1950s and 1960s, when my parents and I (and my sisters) lived on an air base in Hampton. How does this call up these memories? The environments are opposites! In 1960 the Interstate highway system had not yet been constructed through Hampton. We would not have been driving on such a highway, full of cars, so late in the evening.
As I recall, almost everything in Hampton would have been closed by 11 p.m. Certainly the airbase would have been completely quiet except for the Air Force personnel on duty, somewhere out around the air field. Although, remembering later years when I lived on an air base in Japan, I can imagine that the Officers Club, just a block from where we lived on the air base in Virginia, might have still been open. But for me, who lived there as a boy from age six to age eleven, Langley Air Force Base was quiet indeed in the evenings.
Whereas I have just spent an hour watching and listening to traditional dance music from Eastern Europe, which of course would have seemed odd to American military personnel in 1960, smarting still from the launching of Sputnik and the Russian downing, over the Soviet Union, of the American U2 spy plane piloted by Frances Gary Powers.
