winterbadger | a strange sudden invasion of memory

I was walking into the local county rec center the other night and a huge draft of warm, pool-chlorinated air struck me as I was still in the doorway with the cold night air behind me. And all of a sudden I was transported back to January 1985, when I spent a week or two living in the YMCA on Tottenham Court Road in London. I was in a study abroad program that was centered in Bloomsbury, and that was their interim housing location for visiting students until we found a place to live. And about all I remember of it is the smell, the sensation of the warm air fromt he pool that hit you as you came in from the cold of London winter.

That was a fascinating experience for me, those six or seven months I lived there. It was the first place, otehr than college, that I'd lived away from home. It was the first time I'd lived in a big city (I'd visited my gran in New Haven most summers when I was a kid, but I hadn't really lived there). It was the first time I was responsible for finding a place to live, buying groceries, making my own meals (and, as it worked out, meals for my roommate). It was the first time I had a credit card (my parents had given me one for emergencies, and of course, it got used for things that weren't emergencies :-) London was full of new sights, new sounds, new smells. In some ways, I really miss it very much; it's the only time I've really lived in the middle of a big city, and I quite enjoyed it.

I should write more about this sometime, but I just wanted to put this down to remind myself of the sudden accession of memories that was brought on by walking through a doorway...