My husband and I recently returned from a road trip with our daughter and 10 year old grandson. Earlier in the school year Peter studied the Cahokia Mounds, the largest prehistoric Indian site north of Mexico, and we decided to make that our spring break destination and combine it with a couple days in nearby St Louis.
A National Historic Site and also a World Heritage Site, the mounds are well worth a visit, but we also really enjoyed the St Louis Zoo and St Louis Art Museum, and the City Museum is a "don't miss" attraction for kids. And, of course, there is the Arch, but be prepared to stand in line a LONG time. Good bookstores and restaurants, and the bonus of good comic book stores for Peter. We were all happy travelers.
This was also a trip down memory lane time for Papa and GrandNan. We lived in St Louis for the first years of our married life while Bruce was in medical school at St Louis University, and we had not returned to the city for many, many years. Of course, much has changed, but we recognized street names and places once part of our loop of life, including our first apartment, and it was good to think about people and events not remembered for a long time.
We had a good life in St Louis. I taught high school English in a nearby suburb, Webster Groves, and received a master's degree from Washington University during those years. I wondered aloud what our life might have been like if we had decided to stay in St Louis once Bruce finished medical school. We returned to Minnesota, however, for his residency in family practice, and we certainly have never regretted that decision.
Still, I wondered "what if...."
We drove through Lafayette Square, a neighborhood of Victorian homes which were on the brink of restoration when we lived in St Louis. The area intrigued us then. We reminisced about crawling around shells of homes and imagining ourselves living and raising a family there. What would that have been like? Would we have been happy there? What would our life look like now if we had made that decision all those years ago?
This trip was an intersection of memory and imagination.
Memories flowed. An abundance of memories, and it was good to revisit those early years of our life together, but the trip was also a reminder about the many choices, directions, paths there have been along the way. Obviously, we can never know what life would have been like if we had decided to turn left, rather than right, but I suspect our life would have had a similar share of riches, as well as losses, ups as well as downs. We would have encountered challenges, learned lessons, and received gifts along the way.
In other words, we would have lived our lives.
An Invitation
Do you get nostalgic about roads not taken? I would love to know.
Lovely reflections...and yes, sometimes I do think about the "what ifs".
ReplyDeletePerhaps thinking about the "what ifs" can lead to "what now?"
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