Living in the past

On Wednesday this week, I felt as though I had left the twenty-first century and stepped back a few decades. It was a combination of things I was doing but also just something in the air.

In the last week and a half, I have been listening to more AM radio rather than FM. I don't usually do AM, so it seems so strange to me. It's like going to a small town, where everything seems a few decades behind the times. The fuzziness of the sound makes it seem dated, and many of the stations play old or obscure music that I have never heard of before. What is this place?

Because of the weather on Wednesday, work at This Is the Place ended early, so I went downtown and was looking at microfilm of the Salt Lake Tribune from 1991. That triggers my very earliest memories. When I walked outside after doing that, my brain was so accustomed to thinking of things as being decades old that it felt like the 1990s. My research was not unusual, but for some reason the strange weather (cloudy and neither winter nor spring) that particular day made me feel like it was a different time.

On Wednesdays, I help tutor youth from a Tongan ward in Sugar House. This week they changed their location, and I found myself in a part of the city I had never seen before. A lot of the stores in the area were local, non-chain stores, like the kind of thing you would find in a small town. One of these stores was a brownie bakery, so I went and got a brownie with a Peep on it.

Then we finally got to go inside this new church building. It's a very nice building and looks relatively new. But all the classrooms were locked inside the building. I have never seen something like that before. It certainly contributed to the feeling of being in another place or time.

I'm not sure what was so unusual about Wednesday. Aside from the tutoring, the day was pretty typical of the rest of the week. But it was a bit surreal.

I don't usually have that happen to me, even though I have been in the past nearly every day of the last seven years, between editing history, dressing up like history, and researching history.

Most of my blog traffic comes from Facebook, so most of you already saw that my book The Saints Abroad arrived this week, though it's not officially released for another month. They gave me five copies, and I already know who is going to receive the four extra copies. (I don't think any of the recipients read this blog, so sorry, you're not one of them.) Though I have had my name in and on other books before, I feel like this is my book more than any other. I did most of the work on this book, and I did more for it than I have any other book (yet). I doubt it will be read much, but still it's out there.