Google Earth Valentine

Valentine's Day. Nice enough. An e-mail from my undergrad adviser had me surfing the nostalgia wave for a while this afternoon; I got on The Google to see what he looks like these days (same face, but the short mop of brown hair is now white and threatening his waist). While I was on the topic, I figured I might as well check in on another undergrad professor (no apparent change), which then naturally led to a quick look at the surviving English teacher from high school. I couldn't quite picture the building listed as his office address at Holy Cross College, necessitating a few seconds of tapping away at Google Earth, since, hey, Holy Cross is right there by the high school, in the old neighborhood, in the town I used to call home, so a click and a drag and away we went.

Google Earth. Seriously, how can you not be thoroughly boggled at the ability to zoom in and take a bird's eye tour of your old high school campus, getting close enough to see people on the sidewalk and hurdles tipped haphazardly at the side of the track? The football field has been relocated to the west of the school now, where there used to be a small woods. The old field has been obliterated, the footprint of the ancient cinder track reduced to the ghost of an oval ring in the grass to the north of the school. The rest of the woods are still there, still separating the campus from the field where intramurals used to be played and the marching band practiced on more frigid mornings than I care to remember.

The new track, where Tom died, skirts on its west end the edge of the ridge that plunges down to the floodplain of the St. Joe river. Click and drag the image to follow the street west a quarter of a mile down that hill, at the bottom of the curve, and there's my old house, a strange car in the driveway. Click and drag again and there's Tom and Rita's old house, down the block from mine, the trees that dropped leaves I used to rake for him full and green.

I wondered if I still remembered the way I used to walk from home over to Notre Dame, not the grand front entrance route but the back way following the railroad tracks and service drives, the solitary route leading to the quiet refuge of the lakes and the Grotto. Click and drag, click and drag, flying above streets whose names I don't remember but can see in my head, picking my way now from home past the beloved campus and the now-gone soccer fields of my youth, through the four-way stop that confounded me as a novice driver, past the ice cream place and out to the mall. The landmarks of adolescence. It was quietly comforting not to get lost.