I remember listening to the original radio series of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" way back when, before it had been turned into even one book. It fit very well into my quirky view of life as it were, back in the early 1980s. I can't remember what year this was, as I can't associate listening to the series with living in a particular house.
All my life, I've keyed my memories to places and then I would be able to figure out either how old I was at a particular time or what year it was. As an example, one of my earliest memories is of being barefoot outside in a driveway, and this weird white stuff started falling out of the sky - and it was cold and wet! this would have been right around my third birthday because it was when we lived near Denver - and my other memory from that place is coming home from the grocery store with bags of cereal and going down the steps into the basement apartment where we lived.
I moved a lot as a child. A lot. By the time I was 14, I had lived at 14 different addresses - and when you consider that at least a couple of times we stayed in the same house for 3 years, that is a lot of moving. The longest I've lived anyplace was our last place in Los Angeles - we lived there from October 30 1983 to January 1997. Then we moved to Oregon, where we lived in the same cramped townhouse for 3 1/2 years, and then we came to New Hampshire. In September, we will have been here for 6 years - five of them in our current house. The fruit trees we planted when we first moved here have still not really started bearing. Last year we got one peach and then the bugs attacked and the peach tree did not survive the winter. This year the Bartlett pear seems to be having a bumper crop - but the D'anjou didn't blossom, and neither of the cherry trees seem to be happy.
Planting fruit trees, like planting rhubarb or asparagus, is kind of an act of faith. It says that you expect to be in a place for a long enough time period to enjoy the fruits of the labor. But life has a way of surprising one.
The Hitchhiker's Guide was full of surprises and quirky changes. Lately, I have found myself wanting to be able to just listen to it, as it was, again. I suppose that the full set is available somewhere on CD - and I could very well listen to the whole thing on my hour long commute. Or I could just use my imagination and 'hear' the voices of those BBC actors from a generation ago, and remember that the hitchhiker's best tool is his towel.
