The last time I visited my childhood home in Chicago I discovered that my house had been torn down and turned into a parking lot, that my elementary school had been torn down and made into a park, and the grocery store where I worked when I was in high school was now selling some other kind of merchandise. It was a harsh lesson teaching me that life goes on and there's nothing you can do to return to the past, none the less the older I get I still see myself as the little village boy you mentioned. I see him when we go to the beach and he is playing in the waves, or when I'm sitting in my yard he will sometimes peek out at me from behind the trees.