Meandering Through My Memory's Lane

The term "memory lane" must have been coined by someone who was wandering the streets of her childhood neighborhood.  As corny as it sounds rolling off the lips, the phrase takes on heady significance when your Nissan Altima is rolling by the only home you knew as a child, the windows cracked wide to let in all those sweet, long-ago days.

Such was my experience last night as I eased off A Street and slowly wound my way up Twin Ridge Road towards Jill's house. 

How is it that I can walk into the school office each afternoon, wondering what it is that I was supposed to do there, only to have a savant's gift for recollection three hours later, remembering names and faces, the sound of someone's long-ago cackling laughter?

. . . and when Duke-now-David looks up from his plate and calls Jill "Pill?"  It is as though someone has cracked open my skull and blown off the dust of some ancient file cabinet whose sun-starved contents finally come to light.

I am lucky indeed to have these childhood friends among me.  Like a favorite, thread-bare shirt, they are still so familiar, so comfortable against my skin.  Mike, whose long, sun-bleached hair is now close cropped, his words--still warm--slightly bent from all those years out east.  Duke-now-David, a heart hastily taped to his sleeve, unable to stave the flow of sweet memories played out in now-faded photos and notes scrawled in childish loops.  Jill-once-Pill--hostess extraordinaire--who, despite acrid memories of my sweaty, young feet, opens her home with the graciousness that only a strong woman knows.

Joy, too, forever Jill's younger, more fashionable sister.  Joy is there, too, now softened and warmed by a life that has not always been easy.  And, finally, there is Jeannie--Mrs. Johnson--whose quiet laugh and loving kindness have warmed me for so many of my 52 years.  That she, too, so readily shares the stories of our youth lived out on warm August nights on Sumner Street?  Her stories assure me that I have not made up the whole thing.  That these people, indeed, are real and my childhood was, indeed, that sparkly and that joyful.

Most friendships are tagged by the locations in which they were formed--we have our "school friends," our "college friends," our "work friends."  Many of these friendships ebb and flow, anchored by a timeline determined by that location.  My "childhood friends," though, should simply be called "my friends," for theirs is a love forged young yet strong, and set for life.  They have endured too much to succumb to the whims of time and place.