Sunday Salon ~ déjà vu

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I want to say it's "déjà vu all over again," but it's slightly different.  Last week's Sunday Salon was about my quantum leap to Nantucket by using Google maps, as I put myself into the setting of the novel I was reading.  The memoir I finished yesterday was similar, in that the author herself used Google to return to a former home.  Here's the story.

Mother, Daughter, Me ~ by Katie Hafner, 2013, memoir (California), 9/10

Hafner invited her elderly mother to move in with her and her daughter, necessitating a move from San Diego to San Francisco.  The whole memoir is about what that entailed, as the author remembers life events good and (mostly) bad that were problematical for their living together.  Most of the book was about the three women of three generations trying to deal with each other and the men in their lives.  But there was a fourth woman involved, making them not a trio but a foursome — mother, daughter, "me" (the author), and sister.  At the end of the book, she's looking at a photo of herself and her sister Sarah (p. 258).

"It's a large black-and-white print of Sarah and me on our trikes, in front of the Rochester house, at ages five and three."

She describes the two of them, what they're wearing, how they look.  And that's where my surprise came in.  And I grinned as I read this paragraph (p. 259).

"We two sisters are on the long driveway; there's a carefully trimmed hedge behind us, and two young trees.  I take the photograph and put it next to my computer on the dining room table.  I type the address ... into Google Maps.  Up pops the house.  I zoom in on the photo.  There's the big stucco house, set back from the street.  And there's the long driveway, as long as I remember, and the very same hedge now unkempt, and the trees, now matured.  Those two little girls on their tricycles have long since been plucked out of the picture.  No doubt there have been many other kids, in strollers and wagons and on trikes and pogo sticks, bicycles and skateboards, then hand-me-down cars, traveling that driveway in the forty-seven years since Sarah and I left the scene.  I look at the photograph again.  We're going somewhere on those trikes of ours, we just don't know where."

I left out the address, giving you only an ellipsis.  The book gives the address, and I looked up the house myself and "walked" through the neighborhood.  I'm really having fun with Google maps as I read books about places.  I kept googling.  After my mother's mother died when I was three, we moved into her house and lived there for five or six years.  I typed in the address, went there via Google maps, and took a look.  The trees and hedges are gone, but it's been 70 years.  Of course it's changed!

Illustration by Jeff Zwirek

As for me, I hope I never have to move in with a daughter.  Katie Hafner used a pseudonym to protect her mother's privacy, but it must be painful to read what her daughter thinks of her.  As for the book, it's excellent and gets a rating of 9 out of 10 from me.

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