Wausau...

Later on today I'll take to the road and travel to my home town, Wausau, Wisconsin.

I haven't been there in a while and it will be interesting just to drive around the place and see what things have changed and what remains the same. The truth is I'm most curious about what has become of my friends from those days. I would like to think they all still live in the neighborhood and we could just look them up and get together again but that's just a wish. They, like me, have scattered to the winds, their kids are in college and I'm a fragment to them as they are to me.

In the years since I've left Wausau I've had a recurring dream. I'm at the middle school I left in the winter of 1975, and there's a store there with shirts and items with the school's name which I either try to find, or having gotten there, fail to find one that fits before I awake. I think that dream is about my disconnect from those days, that place, my friends and everything that was there, a disconnect I cannot mend.

Many good things have happened since I left Wausau, but I often still feel like a visitor wherever I am, like there was unfinished business in that small town in the middle of Wisconsin which I sometimes hated but where I also felt like I belonged. So I'm not feeling the best, and I've been awake with coughing for too many hours this morning, but I want to go for what reason I'm not sure.

Maybe I just need to buy whatever it was I couldn't get in my dream.