From the Editor

I travel to places. I live the years. This is a book about rendezvous. (The ones I failed to keep are another story.) Each account begins with an image which conjures up something of where the meeting took place. Some would not be easy to find on a map, others would be. All of them, of course, have been visited by other travelers. I hope readers too will find themselves saying: I have been here …

There are some places you visit on the travels of your life that somehow get under your skin. It is not the places that you have been looking forward to visiting, the ones that carry the hope and wishes for fun, excitement, pleasure, or artistic stimulation; these places find us. We arrive by various modes of transportation — sometimes they are not even our final destination — and when we leave, always prematurely, we are beckoned back … no, actually grabbed by memories that thrust themselves into our awareness unbidden. The journey becomes a pilgrimage to the place that will surely confirm or disprove the veracity of those memories and their encumbered feelings.

Returning to the physicality of these places, we retrace our footsteps, trying to remember where we were and what we did, but so often it's confusing: the walls of buildings, the width of streets, the height of trees, the majesty of landscapes all fuse, our memory playing a shell game, we're no longer certain which scenes and images are the real one. Is this the place? New from time and the passing of seasons, more weathered and possibly rebuilt by humankind or nature. Our Ariadne's thread has failed us. What were markers laid down have disappeared, psychically cleaned away, or possibly violently torn. Who was at home on the day we began that journey? Did they imagine it would be easy to return? Was that trust or faith? But sometimes there is a recognition well before the view is in full focus. The mind knows before the senses ascertain and verify.

At a ce