That’s my past-life regression. One of the problems with a past life regression is that they’re embarrassing. It’s a kind of personal archaeology, which is too often sifting through heaps of your own love-letters-to-people-who-dumped-you and stained underwear and empty half-gallon bottles of Gallo Hearty Burgundy and Pop-Tart wrappers.

In a 1904 essay on the nature of History, Bertrand Russell wrote: “The past alone is truly real: the present is but a painful struggling birth into the immutable being of what is no longer.” But Russell lived long enough to know that the past can be painful, too, and that the present achieves a kind of immutable being through embarrassment. If I could change the past so it were less embarrassing, my present would be less substantial than it is, because I would have had no need to develop the sort of moral heft that lets me live with shame.

I kept the name of my sitter just below the threshold of consciousness for most of fifty years, until a few years back when it jumped at me from the obituary column of the Wood River Journal, the weekly Hailey paper. She had died of some dread long-term disease like lupus or Lou Gehrig’s or one of the other things that make you think that when God got through with Job he wasn’t through with the rest of us. The picture they published of her showed her in a terrible state of obesity and inflammation.

I looked further through the paper. I scan it now for the mere mention of a familiar person or family name, as Sun Valley has indeed exploded south and almost all the people I grew up with in Hailey are gone, replaced by a race of people the Soviets wouldn’t have thought worth the deuterium and plutonium needed to blow them straight to hell. They’re all imports from a land where money is just another commodity instead of a measure of sweat and tears. They’re GoreTex-clad cross-training money-managers and doctors and lawyers and venture capitalists and landscapers and head-hunters and people who sold their dot-com stock early in 2000.

In that same issue of the Wood River Journal, one of my dead sitter’s grandsons had gotten caught with an ounce of meth in his car sitting on the console between himself and his girlfriend, who was herself the spawn of those new people, the ones who purchased Hailey from those filthy sturdy unkillable and very poor folks whose birthright it was.

So maybe one of the embarrassing things about being a five year old in this woman’s house is that I didn’t realize she was going to die horribly or that her family was going to rot like the Snopeses of Yoknapatawpha. Maybe the Russian H-Bomb was the least of her worries. One of the worse-than-embarrassing things about being a fifty-four-year-old is knowing that I saw that obituary and didn’t feel pity so much as a grim satisfaction that the person who had made my life miserable for a few months when I was five had gotten hers.

Last year I was in Wood River High School and found the room where they keep all the old yearbooks and I discovered her picture as a high-school senior in 1951. She had been beautiful and young and intelligent once. When I knew her she was fifty or sixty pounds heavier and four years older with three screaming kids and not enough money and she was no longer beautiful and no longer young, and was systematically killing her own intelligence because she couldn’t see any way out of the fix she was in. Consciousness in that situation is just another burden.

When she died she was a hundred pounds heavier than she had been when I knew her and in great pain. And once again, looking at that yearbook, I felt that feeling of grim satisfaction.