As I drove eastward, dusk was settling in.  I wasn’t sure I completely understood the guard’s directions, which mainly involved a surface road I didn’t recall having ever been on before.  Yet for some reason, I still felt reasonably confident I’d be able to find the place.

As it turned out, I not only found the place, I recognized it.
 
I wondered how this could be possible.
 
For a moment, I thought maybe I’d seen it on a postcard, because it looked exactly the way I “remembered” it.  But who sells postcards with pictures of hospitals?  And don’t people in the hospital more typically receive cards than send them?
 
Anyway, my mother had never been much of a letter writer.  When I was a little kid staying with my grandmother for a multi-week period, I missed my mother to the point of tears, and I overheard my grandmother pleading with her on the phone to write me a letter.  She never did.  Ditto for the couple of times I was sent to summer camps.  I was pretty certain she hadn’t written me when she was in the hospital in Pleasanton.

What was stranger still was that in a facility with several buildings, I strode without hesitation up to the exact one she had actually been in.
 
Before I even entered it, I sensed something very warm and positive about the place. Once inside, that impression was confirmed—not only from the cheerfully outgoing man at the desk who personally remembered my mother, but also from the lively conversations going on all around us in the lobby.