Paul's Comments

Many years ago my mother decided to move our family from Long Beach, California to Texas. We stayed in Dallas for about a week, my mother discovered the place wasn't right, then moved to Midland, where we lived for about three months before moving back to Long Beach.

Writing about my trip to Riverside and remembering how I looked through the glass doors of the now-closed Greyhound bus depot into the empty and debris-strewn floor of an abandoned building, and being able to recall from memory the way it had looked several years before, reminded me of a couple of stories.

When we were in Dallas, we were looking up apartments in the newspaper, and needed to find a pay phone. To look back on this, and realize it was only about 1980, not the 1960s, and realize how much technology has changed the world, still kind of amazes me.

But I digress. Anyway, we were on the first floor of the Dallas City Hall, and went downstairs to find a pay phone. Instantly it hit me where we were - in the basement of Dallas City Hall - and I wanted to see if my mother recognized it. So I said to her, "Does this place look familiar?" She admitted that she was surprised that it did. Then I asked her if she knew why. She didn't. I pointed out she'd seen it before, because this was where Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald. (No matter what strange Kennedy assassination theories people come up with - and I even indirectly made one up for a book I wrote - there's no doubt about this one happening since it was televised live and recordings have been shown zillions of times in various programs.)

On the way to and from Texas, traveling by road means basically taking I10 to get in and out of California. Which goes through several major areas including Phoenix and Tucson in Arizona. Well, anyway, we stopped in Phoenix to get something to eat. So I needed to find where there was a supermarket. I found a pay phone, and it had a phone book. (Again, today that would be two miracles that are no longer available due to changes in technology.) I looked up a few until I found one that seemed reasonably close, or I might have even called them. So anyway, I drove over and we bought bread, lunch meat, Miracle Whip - I wouldn't use mayonnaise for probably another 20 years - sodas and other incidentals. Then we stopped for a bit, and continued on.

We came back about four months later, traveling through Phoenix on the way back to the Los Angeles area. Again, we needed to get some food, so as it turned out, I drove over to the same supermarket I had visited on the previous trip. Without benefit of looking at a map or anything else, I had just simply remembered how to get there even though I had only been there once, in a city I had never been to before.

It kind of amazes me, sometimes. I don't know if I could do that sort of thing again, but it was kind of interesting. And, like a lot of things, the significance of the incident didn't hit me until later.