One recent late afternoon, I was driving when an “old feeling” came over me (not the one written about by Sammy Fain). It was a late ’50s, early ’60s feeling, but inspired by nothing physically remaining from that time to knock loose such memories. Not long ago, at an old car show, I walked abreast of those “antiquities” and only got half the ’50s feeling of that which hit me the other day.

I’ve had this “past feeling” in the midst of “present things” before, and no, this doesn’t have anything to do with that “past foreseeing” one-time resident of Virginia Beach.

I first experienced this on a weekend in the early 1970s when home from Appalachian for the summer. My mother wanted to go to the old Roses store (the biggest in the chain), and as we pulled into the hot parking lot, a late afternoon summer sun temporarily blinded me. The air was stagnant, seeming so dense as to have stopped the clouds in their ceaseless track from horizon to horizon.

From my youth, it seemed to me that the march of time wasn’t really being measured by clocks, but instead the forever, west to east “march of clouds” past the sun (at night, by a similarly directional “ad infinitum” march of clouds past the moon).

The time, or rather “feeling” to which I was carried in backwards transport from the old Roses 1970 parking lot was my late 1950s front porch just off the Old Concord Road. (The Old Concord Road didn’t run through “the middle of the house,” as the late Larry Hooper sang on the Lawrence Welk Show, but it strung our neighborhood memories together).

That latter ’50s time was similar to that late afternoon in 1970, a summer day of heat and humidity. The western clouds coming up over W.A. Cline’s cow pasture were halted, as if having “run aground” in the sky. Off to the southwest, a clumpy group of time’s “counters” seemed to have piled up into the familiar “anvil” shape, but being “unstruck,” this anvil remained static and silent.

I wasn’t carried from 1970 back to that ’50s scene, itself but to only to how that scene felt. The experience was a subtle one, like viewing things through only the hint of a tint of very lightly shaded sunglasses.

These two experiences of such ”feelings” seem limited to the “becalmed” days of late summer more so than fall or winter, possibly because we unconsciously speed up to lessen the chilling effects of “Old Man (the Lesser) Fall” and “Old Man (the Greater) Winter.”

There were many hot, sticky days in my life in which time seemed to stall. Family time with in-laws at Hyco Lake in late summer was another of those occasions in which the clouds became stuck in both sky and reflection.

Then there was a late, muggy afternoon in my childhood when I followed a trail ants of ants through the yard as they lugged the colony’s eggs to some new place (the kind of thing which some wiseacres call a “slow news day”). My time seemed to have gone from super Andante (no hidden “ant” pun, I promise) to a standstill while the ants were marching in “cut time!”

Other hot days centered around when my late wife Diane and I took our children Rachel and Jeremy on August trips to Carowinds, King’s Dominion and Busch Gardens.

Due to the heat index and long waiting in line, those “amusement park days,” along with “front porch days,” “watching the lake days,” “tracking the ants days” and many others have the potential of becoming the objects of my own subtle form of time travel, and being “felt” again.