I've been down to see my dad's grave only a few times since he died now more than 40 years ago. His final resting spot is something like 4-5 hours from my house in an almost forgotten village where the streets have no names. Each time I've visited the place in the last 25 years--twice--odd events struck. The first time, in the early 1990s, I hadn't been by to see it in since I was 10-12 years old and swung by on a lark, somehow found the town on a map and parked my bike on one of the few paved streets in that little blue river town. I walked around remembering houses and buildings from one of my visits from my childhood. My dad had grown up in this town, and had graduated from high school there, when they still had a high school. His family settled in there as well, his brother, and assorted cousins and stuff. I'd been there for a wedding and a funeral when I was a kid, won my first fist fight (I'd lost a ton of them previously, of course) in an alley in that...