Malls

In re: Crabtree Valley Mall. My senior year in high school, I saw--on TV--the Sean Connery movie "A Fine Madness" for the first time. In the movie, the character played by Connery frequently wore a corduroy sports jacket. Well needless to say, the 17-year-old me thought that was just about the coolest article of clothing I had ever seen. I had saved up some money and decided that the next Saturday that I could get access to a car, I was going to drive to RALEIGH! to buy a corduroy jacket, just because I was sure nothing that cool could possibly be purchased anywhere closer to where I lived than RALEIGH! A good friend found out my plan and joined the quest for my personal Holy Grail. So off we went to Crabtree Valley Mall with approximately the same enthusiasm that King Arthur probably had when he set forth in search of Excalibur. We quickly located a men's clothing store and it had a corduroy sports jacket in my size and in my price range. I tried it on and it fit perfectly, no tailoring needed. I was just about to hand the clerk my money, when my "friend" asked, "Does this jacket have a matching set of pants?" To the salesman credit, he didn't openly laugh but merely affirmed that they did. And I tried the pants on with the jacket and they were too big in the waist and would have to be taken in. I tried to put off buying the pants, reasoning I did not want to drive all the way back to RALEIGH! just to pick them up, but my "friend" insisted I could get them taken in back in our hometown. And, of course, the salesman thought that was a terrific idea. So, I bought both. I loved that sports jacket and wore it every occasion where it was even remotely suitable. I wore the completely ensemble once, felt I looked so ridiculous in it that I never repeated that mistake. B/T/W, while that corduroy sports jacket is long gone, as is my 17-year-old physique, I still have a--significantly larger--corduroy sports jacket in my closet.
 
Yeah, it probably was the past summer storm. The memories start to run together before they fizzle out. I turned 67 yesterday. 😶
I hate to break it to you, but I am 73yo , and our memories only get more collapsed with each passing year.

German philosopher Walter Benjamin posed that memory collapses time and doesn't just retrieve the past but actively reconstructs it from the perspective of the present.

I often joke that my particular memory of an event could have happened 20 years ago, 10 years ago, or last month, and the details may not be precise, but that doesn't mean it is a false memory.
 
I often joke that my particular memory of an event could have happened 20 years ago, 10 years ago, or last month, and the details may not be precise, but that doesn't mean it is a false memory.
I have moved a lot in my adult life (nine interstate moves between my late 20s until my retirement in 2021, and that doesn’t include moving within an area-I would typically rent when we first moved then buy once I understood an area well enough to know where I wanted to live.) I am usually able to know when memories happened based on where I was when events occurred. Those geography-based segments are helpful time frames.
 
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