EPISTEMOLOGY[2] -- HOW DO I KNOW THAT I KNOW ...

How do I know that I know where West is when  I am being guided by my Massachusetts mind?  There are many of you out there who have never experienced this puzzling reality.  So, sit back and see if you can somehow relate.
I was born, brought up and grew up mostly in Massachusetts.  I have dear friends who are my age and who have the same genesis.  I left Massachusetts many years ago, have lived in many places on the planet since I have left.  For the last 37+ years I have lived in a part of the coastal region of California.  I have friends who have approximately the same historical trajectory in their lives.  So, we started out lives on the East [Right] Coast and are now living on the West [Left] Coast. So there are times when our "congenital" drivers take over our lives and we loose track of what is East and what is West.  Really!  I know this because we have talked about it among ourselves more than once.
It all begins in the womb.  Doesn't everything?  Here we are growing and developing in water, in a water that knows that the Great Water lies to the East.  The Womb Water releases us into the aegis of the Great Water of the East.  We grow up and mature under the Aegis of the Great Water of the East and it becomes an intimate element of our being.  Now, out of  the womb, but captive to the Prime element of reality, the Great Water of the East, we mature as we reckon our comings and our goings by the calling of the Great Water of the East.
Then, we forsake the Land Mass called East and settle on the Land Mass called West.  This is a very dangerous move.  We will now have great difficulty ever knowing exactly where we are.  We are forever the children of the Great Water of the East, and we will never be anything or anyone else with allegiance placed anywhere else.  Just the other day, when I was driving a mere 1.5 miles inland from the Great Water of the West, I took a turn that pointed me in the direction of the Great Water from the East because that is what my entire being knows.  My brain knew [and knows] where the water is and the Water imbibed my brain with directional signals so that I turned TOWARD the water [East], when I knew full well that the sign and the arrow said West and not EAST.
I made the turn and suddenly realized what had happened.  I still can't believe it.  I've been here on the West Coast for over 30 years.  My friends have been here for about the same amount of time.  We still are victims of the disconnect between Brain Epistemology and Total Being Epistemology.  Forget the big words.  Just show me the way.  My essential epistemological question at this point is, "What happens if we move to St. Louis?  Is the Mississippi River big enough to cure us of our epistemological imbalance?

DO YOU REMEMBER HIM? HER? THEM? IT?

The past sometimes gets to be the present.  I have been having throw-back thoughts a lot lately and I have to smile at so many of them because they are downright pleasant.  Most of them have been about people, but in order to get the point across and get past the scantily clad females on Google, I chose to show a 1949 Hudson Wasp.  I won't bore you with how scantily clad can possibly be a logo for nostalgia.  But, I guess, on Google, when in doubt, slide anything into the open space.  Enough of that, already!
I'm sure so many of you think of people you knew when you were in school.  Since the names of the people I think of don't mean much, if anything to you, I'll just describe the characteristics that make them easy to remember.  So, the other day it was the girl in kindergarten who didn't stop crying for a week.  I remember her because she was very plain, and never got to be anything but "plain" as she grew up.  It took her a week to get over her separation anxiety and she lived a mere 100 yards away from the school.  She had a strange name, for us, since we didn't know Italian then.  Her name was Bella.  [With apologies to Antonio Phaneuf, my first cousin/quasi brother]  I think of him a lot.  Mainly I think of what he looked like when he was 17, and not 87!  I also think a lot about a bunch of cousins and quasi cousins that I went to school with.  They were a great bunch but I never grew up around them and the only influence they had on my development was the contact that we had in school.  We lived rather far apart, and they were second and third degree cousins, so we didn't have them in our lives at the first degree level, if you get my drift.  But I think of them a lot, and have been carrying them around in my head for about a month now.  [The Durand family, for those of you who know]  I think a lot about the first classmate of ours who died.  He was less than 20 if I remember correctly, and he died of natural causes, rather than of street violence or automobile accident.  He was followed by the classmate who had hydrocephalus [His cranium was enlarged due to poor drainage of fluid back into his system]  He had a hard time walking and he had a difficult time learning how to write.  He did surpass the first person to die by some years.  I have been thinking of my father's uncle Theo.  He is the person who had the gift of stopping bleeding.  He didn't have to touch the person.  All he had to do is to pray for the bleeding to stop, and it did.  He came to the United States one time [from Canada].  He was a huge human being.  A gentle giant with a booming laugh.  That was it.  I saw him twice for a total of 3 or 4 hours.  Never saw him again except in my mind, often.  Mainly I remember asking  myself what good was it to stop blood when the far away people like us couldn't reach him anyway?  I was not sassy enough in my childhood to ask him, but I was thinking of it, a lot.
As you know, I could go on about this for a long time.  But I won't.  I'm putting this before you to invite you to marvel at the wonder of our memory and the ability that we have to make the past vividly present in our lives.  I suppose that this too falls into the category of epistemology.  You remember that,right?  There are these moments in our lives when I think we have to stop and admire the mystery of what we are.  Not the mystery that we don't know, but the mystery that we believe in.  It is in this belief that we nurture the conviction of the truth about what we come to know about ourselves and about the rest of the humans with whom we live and by whom we are surrounded every day.  Now that I think of it, a 1949 Hudson with "step down into it" technology is a rather weak symbol of what I really wanted to express today.  But somehow it is better than the alternatives among which I made the choice.