Personal mysteries solved years later

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was talking to my mother today about that scared feeling you sometimes get when you realize that you’ve zoned out while driving. Then I asked her if I ever told her about the time I drove through Lowell, MA twice.

At the time I’d been driving from Taunton MA back home to Raymond NH (my mom and brother moved during my senior year of high school so they could look after my great-grandmother, and I spent weekends down there), and since I’d only had my license a year, my parents asked me to stick to 495 for as much of these trips as I could, which meant all but the last 20 odd miles. I agreed because the thought of driving through Boston, alone, at night was more than a little terrifying to a new driver who is afraid of bridges. 495 is easy, and the landmarks at night - of a brightly lit city visible from the highway sort - are easy to recognize: Lowell, then Andover, then Lawrence, and then get off at Haverhill and take 125 the rest of the way home.

So one night, I drove by Lowell, and then drove on, expecting to see Andover next. But when the next brightly lit patch came up, it wasn’t Andover. It was Lowell. This has never made any sense to me, because there are no areas along 495 like this before you get to Lowell. So where was I?? Did I hallucinate a city before Lowell? Was I abducted by aliens? I’ve never had any idea what happened that night.

Until I told my mother this story today.

“The Lowell connector,” she immediately said.

“What?”

“You didn’t veer the right way, and got on the Lowell connector. If you stayed on it, it’d do a big loop around back to 495. So you circled Lowell and saw it twice. It’s an easy mistake to make if you’re not paying close attention.”
So now, sixteen years later, I finally know what happened.

How about you? Are there any mysteries you finally got answers to years later? Perhaps ones like this that someone else solved for you?

2

When I was about 6 years old, my mother, older brother and older sister went to a park and saw a neat stone footbridge high over a stream. For some reason, I remember the experience vividly, probably because I mad that my mother wouldn’t let me walk across the “dangerous” bridge, even though she did let my siblings cross. They were more expendable, I guess.

A couple of years later I mentioned the bridge, thinking we should go back so I could cross it this time. Neither my mother, brother, nor sister knew what I was talking about. They had apparently forgotten the whole episode. They tried to convince me that it was all a dream, but I knew it was real. Unfortunately I wasn’t sure what park had the bridge. I thought it was Letchworth State Park near where we lived in upstate New York, so I convinced my parents to take me there. We looked and looked but never found any bridge like the one I remembered. We went back to Letchworth several times over the years that we lived in the area, and every time I looked for the bridge without success.

Years later, while living in New Hampshire, I happened to come across a picture of Sentinel Bridge at Watkins Glen State Park (also in NY) in a library book. “That’s the one!” I said. When I showed the picture to my mother and siblings, they still didn’t remember ever seeing or crossing the bridge, but they did confirm that we visited Watkins Glen park once when I was about 6 or 7. I am absolutely convinced that was the bridge I remember. I haven’t been back to see the bridge in person, but from time to time I think about going down there.

3

That… doesn’t really make sense. The Lowell connector doesn’t circle the city - the expressway just abruptly ends at Gorham St in downtown Lowell - arguably a much worse fate than driving through Boston. Unless she meant you were just circling all the on & off ramps where 495, Rte 3, and the Lowell connector meet, but you surely would have noticed that. I think your mother is in league with the aliens.

4

I was going to post a mystery that I haven’t yet solved, but a quick internet search cleared it up.

There was a great Cajun restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard that we went to every year. It was called Lola’s. There was also decent Mediterranian restaurant on a different part of the island, but I don’t remember the name. I think it was Tropical, but I’m not sure.

A couple of years ago someone told me that Lola’s had gone away. Very sad! But I still saw it on some web searches. All sorts of inquiries produced different results. The best that I could find was that it was still open, but in a new location, one much easier to get to. Awesome!

But last year I went to that location, and it wasn’t there. What was there was a national landmark, and had been there since 1889. No Lola’s. But it would be a crime to tear down the landmark.

Even odder, the Lola’s sign was still at the old location.

And I found the restaurant Tropical, but it was Brazilian food, not Mediterranian. And it was terrible. And a buffet. And not quite in the location that I had remembered. The location that I remembered had a restaurant called Blue Canoe.

Did Lola’s still exist or not? And if so, where? And was Tropical really that bad the last time we were there? And what the hell was Blue Canoe?

I was on the island two weeks ago, and that stupid Lola’s sign was still there. Why didn’t they take it down? I’d heard that the location was taken over by some place called – Mediterranian.

I checked on chowhound just now, and here’s what was posted just days after I left there last year:

The owner’s of Lola’s decided to close up shop and move back to New Orleans. Mediterranian moved out of their old location and into Lola’s. A new restaurant named Blue Canoe moved into Mediterranian’s old location. But Lola’s came back, and Mediterranian got kicked out and can’t find a home. Tropical has always been where it is, and is still the only restaurant on the island that stays empty through the dinner hour.

5

When I was a kid, I used to want to go deer hunting with my dad and my older brother. We had a family friend who used to hunt with her dad, so I knew it was something girls could do. When I would ask my mom about it, always once my dad and bother had gone off, she would say “Oh, you could go, Dad would take you…” but the invite never came. I couldn’t figure out why, and the appeal went away. When I brought this up in the past year, my brother finally said “Oh yeah, Dad would have taken you except Mom didn’t want him to.”

6

When I was 11, I went to Portugal on a trip with my family. While we were visiting the cathedral in Lisbon, I noticed many stones on the floor of the main part of the church that had odd little symbols carved in them, almost like alchemical symbols. Many of them were in odd places, like right underneath a pew or against the wall or in the middle of the main aisle – single symbols carved deeply into the stone.

I asked my dad (the Expert of All Things) what they meant, and he said, “Oh they were just carved by someone who was bored during the service,” not as a joke but as a serious answer. Even at 11 I knew this couldn’t be true – you can’t kneel in the aisle and carve into rock during Mass, for God’s sake, and at any rate, what did those symbols mean?

This stayed with me for years. At the time, I was a fanciful child and thought they were secret codes about treasure or magic or something cool like that. As an adult, I couldn’t think of a rational explanation for random symbols not from Christian iconography carved in plain sight into the floor of a cathedral.

Fast forward about 20 years. I’m working in a library as a cataloger and I pick up a book on my cart about how cathedrals were built. I flip through the book and find an illustrative plate of what look like alchemical symbols…and…mystery solved.

They were quarry marks. These marks were carved into stones by stone masons so that the cathedral builders would know what quarry they came from, where the stones should go as they were placed, and so forth. That’s all.

No magic, no treasure.

:frowning:

7

Mine are just all sorts of really beautiful plants and flowers that I remember from childhood. When I was in my twenties and got better and better in botany, I recognised most of those plants in my books. Knowing a flower I assocaited with a time and a place, has a Latin name, what varieties are for sale at plant nurseries, and all the ecology of them, took a bit of the magic out.
That magic got replaced with other magic, though.
Okay, so that February forest white with snowdropswasn’t connected with fairies in any way. But snowdrops have some wicked genetic adaptations to be able to bloom in february and: pollinated by ants!

8

Senior year in college, I was sharing an apartment with 2 other girls. After we got back from Christmas break, the 3 of us were tired. All. The. Time. No matter how much rest we got. We even had the gas company come out and check the furnace to see if there was a gas leak.

After spring break, we felt better. We figured we just needed the sunlight or something.

10 or so years later, I read an article on someone who nearly went on disability for something similar… until she found her hot water heater was venting carbon monoxide. Problem fixed. I read the article and this big lightbulb went on in my head. We’d sealed up all the gaps around the windows etc. because the place literally leaked like a sieve - and this allowed the CO to accumulate. Yikes.

9

My mom made THE worst chocolate chip cookies in the world. She would basically take the toll-house recipe and double the flour. I always assumed this was due to some wrongheaded attempt at high-altitude compensation (Denver) or just trying to “stretch” the chocolate, etc.

Nope, she later admitted that if she made them according to the recipe, they didn’t last. Yeah, Mom, because then they are actually GOOD!