Evidently something I saw at Greystone burned itself into my imagination. Or should I say someone.  as I transcribed my old short story "Belly Up" I noticed a figure who made a single brief appearance:

A man in gray––a much dingier and more poorly pressed uniform than the others, and without the forest ranger hat––was on the grass raking leaves.

"Excuse me," mom called. The man looked up, but in the wrong direction, and went back to his leaves.

"Excuse me, Sir!" she said. He looked up again, this time making the effort to find out where the sound was coming from, and returned to his leaves.

I wrote that in 1983. It wasn't until I spoke those words aloud in 2014, into the microphone that transcribes them into letters on a screen, that I realized I had––in about 2003–– given this man life in my novel Souls Fall Through. He appears as my protagonist's vision of safety and security: to be confined to an institution where he has no other concerns than maintaining the appearance of the quasi-natural world around him. Check this out:

He sits down on the love seat and pictures another Wallace outside: hunched over, twenty years older, and sweeping up the courtyard in a gray nuthouse uniform. He looks down at the flagstone and acts like nothing exists in the world except the debris he’s sweeping up from it. But wind blows things in. Leaves fall from the shrubs and trees, then decay. Wallace remembers the first time he sat in the red love seat and looked out at the courtyard, and he wonders whether the self he sees outside is the one who never had to leave Dr. K’s house. Somebody who found a place of refuge here and stuck around forever, helping out with cleaning and lifting and fetching in exchange for never having to face the world. Never having to face what he’d done to it once, and what he could do to it again. 

Wallace Spurgeon (you can read more about him here) is a victim of childhood sexual abuse who grew up to become a rapist. What was the story of the leaf-raking man at Greystone? Why did he stick in my nine-year-old head? Why did my knowledge of this connection arise only now, as I poke around in the muck of the past? What does the fact of his longevity in my subconscious say about my own vision of inanity?

And why does the mind do this to us? How can anyone who's paying attention not be amazed my its capacities?