Sorry this post is late, but I have the sort of headache that just won’t quit. As some of you know – I whine about it enough – I’m prone to headaches anyway and I suspect this is just stress, but I’ve been having a headache and extremely painful throat for several days.
As most of you know, I’m about to fly to Portugal this next Friday. It’s always an emotionally complex endeavor to visit, because well… it’s theoretically my native land, but I’ve been away for twenty five years and twenty five years of more rapid change there than here.
When my husband and I visited Charlotte, NC, which we left 19 years ago, yeah, the neighborhood we left behind was now an old established neighborhood and the little peach tree in the front yard, which I planted the year we moved is now a big, overspreading tree. BUT we could still understand how things worked and by and large we could still find our way around. Portugal has changed so much I can get lost in the village where I was born and raised. New streets and a batch of stack a proll apartments, as it gets swallowed by the growth of the city of Porto (it’s now considered part of Greater Porto) makes it a foreign land. When they say you can’t go back again, they’re deadly serious.
To make things worse, I was never an adult in Portugal. Oh, okay, so I got married at 22, but I had just finished college and still lived with my parents. I simply have no idea how certain things are done… like dealing with a bank, or buying a toothbrush.
This causes a weird mental disconnect as I feel I SHOULD know how to do this stuff, but I don’t.
This year, it’s all complicated by having to go without my husband (money, mostly) which after twenty five years is a very difficult thing to do, particularly since the visit will last two weeks.
Because of all that, I’ve not been able to finish Darkship Renegade. The good news is that I JUST bought extra batteries for the laptop and there will be all this time in the air to work. The bad news is that… I haven’t finished it.
It will be done by the time I return, I promise, and I’ll have news on the subscription: Costs, dates, etc and a mailbox to send checks to for those of you who don’t use paypal.
Meanwhile today I stayed late in bed, reading, trying to de stress. Now I’ll finish the overdue short story. And then maybe I’ll finally get to the novel.
According To Hoyt 
Oh boy, a second opportunity to say it.
Relax, Sarah. It not like it’s the end of the world. ;D
Enjoy Portugal, employ your imagination. Your parents have moved to a new planet, taking their town with them, but it got a bit scrambled in the trans mat. You can explore, find the places that got lost, marvel at the other places that got mixed in the middle, and try to work out the strange alien customs that have somehow sprung up in NovoPorto. (Didn’t someone write this? I want to say Mercedes Lackey.)
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Something I often dwell upon is the way that the RATE of change has altered in relatively recent history. Moreover, the changes seem to be as much qualitative as quantitative. Take a farmer from 1 AD and move him forward to a farm in 1900 and it seems likely he would understand the process of farming. Sure, plows are far advanced and the animals pulling the plow are much developed, but the process remains much the same. Now bump that farmer to the present and he will stare at a combine in wonder.
Take Guttenburg from his time to 1950 and he would be flabbergasted by the advances on his press but would probably still comprehend the process in spite of the changed scale. But jump a printer’s devil from 1950 to the present and display for him the standard home printing set-up — PC, Laser printer — and he’s dumbfounded.
The process of change is so often so incremental as to be undramatic and often un-noticeable. Some of it is the change from mechanical to other forms of energy, some of it is notable only in retrospect (in High School — this year I am non-attending my 40th reunion — I programmed room-sized computers on punched paper tape; now … well, all the programming is essentially in the background, ennit?) The past is another country, indeed, and sometimes the past is closer than we think.
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