Old World Feelings

A Story by David

Old World Feelings

I just know I am not alone in this. It would be pompous and erroneous. I must ask have you ever gone past a place you have never been and suddenly realize from the very bottom of your being that you have been there ? This happens to me a great deal. The first time I experienced it, I believe I was around seven years of age. I used to spend weekends with a great aunt and great grandfather. This aunt would like to take long drives and of course always took me. We ended up this one day in a town called Putnam. It is an old mill town in Connecticut . It was a rotting old town with nothing going on except some cattle grazing and they were as boring as the town. However there was a place to get an ice cream cone! These things are so very important to a seven year old! Taking our creamy bounty we drove a small way and parked on the side of the road in a turnout.

As my cone disappeared I gazed across the street at an open space it was so rocky that it would never be used for planting. All of a sudden it had a feel of something so old, full of rocks, boulders, moss. It was elevated, maybe one hundred feet above where we were parked. The feeling this place gave me was almost that of a Gaelic battle field. It is now a hundred years later and that picture is as clear as it was that summer day so very long ago. I had never been there but have passed by it several times and each time I get that very same feeling. Somehow there is a connection ?

As a young man I attended one of the premier prep schools in the country at the time. It was, until I enrolled, a military academy. It was run by a headmaster of advanced age. His name was Arthur Sheriff and he had been the master of this school for a great many years. This man had great respect from all the student body and faculty alike. He retired my first year there. How unfortunate for me. This was another one of those feelings that just do not disappear. Cheshire Academy at the time was so very well respected and old. The building that housed the classes were a mix of old and new. The town also had a mixed feeling. The classes were incredibly small . A big class was nine. I would walk into some of the older class rooms and suddenly the smell the building of a hundred and fifty years ago and was transported elsewhere. The closeness of the room found me back then. It was a wonderful feeling as opposed to the Gaelic battlefield but still unanswered. When I was there I felt twice my age. I felt more like faculty that student body. Sun spilling in two hundred year old windows, that scent of aged wood. I swear I had been here long before and still belong there.

This is far from scientific and just two of so many of these feelings.

I find the mind an amazing machine. I have an acquaintance that a surgical nurse and psychologist, has told me interesting facts. If the mind is asked to find something it will continue to do so until the end of time if that is what it takes. I guess I am saying, have you ever tried to remember something and it escapes you until maybe weeks later? This is that effect. Your brain will search without your knowledge until found. I think this is part of that mystery?

Just hope I may have peaked your interest and provoked you to think.

Thanks for reading