Scattered Pictures

Two of my friends' parents' have recently sold their childhood homes.  My parents' still live down the street from them, so I haven't lost my connection to the neighborhood of our youth.

But knowing that my friends will have lost their connection, knowing that they won't be a short walk away over the Christmas holidays - somehow this makes me sad and incredibly nostalgic.  Everything is changing!  I want to whine.

My friend Malls sends me the link to the realtor's website for her parents' house.  "How are you doing with all this?" I ask, and she replies, "It's surreal."  I agree.  Clicking through the pics of her house on the website, I'm confronted with specter after specter of childhood memories.

There, in the family room, I remember all of us standing in front of the television one summer, watching MTV play the video of Lisa Loeb's "Stay" for the millionth time, and we knew every word.  There, in the basement, we threw Mall's a surprise 16th birthday party.

There, in the backyard, we created obstacle courses for her dog, Alex (who I called "Gerald," though I can't remember why).  There, on the pink carpet of Mall's bedroom, was where I found Mall's beta fish one time when I was pet-sitting.  There, in the upstairs bathroom, is where I performed a burial at sea for said fish.

There, that spare bedroom, was where I stayed for two weeks during my junior year of high school when - in a fit of angst over an unjust curfew - I packed up all my belongings and moved out of my parents' house.  And...moved up the street.  To an identical model of house.  To be watched over by Malls' parents, who were friends with my parents.  And who enforced pretty much the same curfew.  (Smooth move, Teenage Kristy.)

There, in the kitchen, we made a cake for our swim coach - a recipe of our own devising, including flour, sugar, and...everything else we could find in the refrigerator.  There, in the driveway, we set small (contained) fires.  There, in the front hall, we peered out the windows while calling the cops on a party next door (we were deviants, of the mostly-bratty persuasion).

A litany of memories at Mall's house, and an equally long list for Terr's house, down the street.  These places now belong to strangers; what will become of my memories?  Will they continue to fade, now that I'm unable to visit the hallowed ground where they were made?

"Ugh, I hate change," I tell Malls, but she argues, "You?  You move all the time.  You love change."

True enough.  Part of me loves change.  Another part, however, really struggles with it, really struggles with a fear of the unknown, is really scared to lose ties to the past.

But what can we do?  Change - whether we love it or not - is inevitable.  As Barbra Streisand said at the end of the 1972 classic screwball comedy, What's Up, Doc?:

"Listen kiddo, you can't fight a tidal wave."

So we lean in and go with it.  Trusting that what matters - what really matters - hopefully sticks with us and can't be sold, and that what is lost was never really ours to hold on to anyways.

Once Upon a Time in Europe

“Florence is full,” we were told, and the No Vacancy signs displayed in every pensione between the train station and the Arno confirmed this uncomfortable truth: we had arrived without reservations and now had no place to stay.

When Ivano, with his long black hair and shirt open to the fourth button, called out to us – two young American travelers wearing backpacks and expressions of mild panic – offering us beds in his sparsely furnished, make-shift hostel, advertised only by a piece of masking tape over the door buzzer which read (in faint pencil font) “The Backpack Shack,” we agreed, fearing our only other option was camping on a hard bench back at the train station.

In postcards home, we wrote our parents about the art-full Uffizi gallery, the shop near the Duomo that sold fifty flavors of gelato, and the surrounding Tuscan countryside, but we tactfully omitted mention of our lodgings, the unctuous proprietor, and the police raid that (may or may not have) happened there that night we had no reservations in Florence.

For the Love of a Sofa

It was born in 1981 in the far-off, corn-growing land of Illinois. MadDawg’s family brought it back east some time later, where it spent a happy adolescence in a basement in the Virginia suburbs. In November of 2001, on a sunny day amid falling leaves, it was loaded onto a Ryder truck and driven north to the great state Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The Hide-a-Bed.

Yes, folks, the Hide-a-Bed.

Part sofa. Part pull-out bed. Part treasured member of my Boston urban family.

It was the color of five-day-old oatmeal streaked with flecks of carrot. The fabric was not what one could call “soft,” but it held up well. In later years, it took brute force (and a little luck) to get the bed to close up properly into sofa position. But we didn’t judge the good little couch; the passing years had taken their toll on us, as well. No one is as limber as we once were. Poor little couch.

And yet so much more than just a couch, wasn’t it? It was an instrument of hospitality. SmAsh took up residence on it that first winter he owned the boat, when it was too cold to spend the night in Boston Harbor – the Hide-a-Bed was his safe harbor then. And when the Trafmeister Jenneral and SJT needed a place to lay their heads during times of transition, the Hide-a-Bed was home for them, too.

The couch held our friends, and it also helped us make new ones. When moving it into our Somerville apartment, its massive girth attracted the attention of our new neighbors, who were quite neighborly and helped us haul it up the front steps and into the living room. And from then we were friends – sharing food at holiday potlucks and drinking White Russians at Big Lebowski movie nights.

And when it came time to journey to fancier digs across the river, that couch was the proving ground of true friendship. I still remember feeling so blown away with gratitude for our dear urban family who so cheerfully helped us move. You can tell true friends by the ones who will help you move a Buick of a sleeper-sofa up three flights of stairs.

The Hide-a-Bed also enjoyed being our bleacher seats for major sporting events. I was sitting on it in 2004, flanked by fellow Sox fans, watching the TV with disbelieving eyes as the curse was reversed and the Red Sox won their first World Series since 1918. And it was the perfect perch to curl up on each time the Olympics (!!) rolled around and you felt like watching some late-nite curling coupled with Bob Costas’ human interest stories.

I took naps (awesome, awesome naps) on that couch. I shared laughs and practical jokes on that couch. I cried out a lot of sadness and drama on that couch, over the years.

I was looking forward to one day bringing a boy home and introducing him to the couch. That could possibly sound a little dirty, but shame on you if you read it that way. I simply meant that I wanted my future someone to have a chance to meet and greet the piece of furniture that played such a pivotal role in my twenty-something years.

But alas, the Hide-a-Bed can no longer remain in our lives. It is being called on to its next destiny (with a brief layover in a lovely spot known as Goodwill). I hope it will bring as much fellowship and comfort into the lives of its next owners as it did into mine.

Goodbye, Hide-a-Bed! You served us well. Thanks for the memories.

Remembering Helen

She had four older siblings (one of which was my grandmother) and four younger siblings – the very middle of a set of nine. They grew up during the Depression – nine mouths to feed when food was scarce – raised alone by their mother, after their father ran off to do whatever it was men ran off to do at that time.

Her oldest brother left, too, years later, when my mom was a baby; he went west after the war and never returned east. She lost her sisters: some too young and some in later years, late in life. Then her younger brothers passed, and Helen – the middler – remained, alone of the nine.

She had red hair – whether by genetics or by choice, I’m not sure, but as far back as I can remember it was red, and she kept it red until recently, though pushing ninety years old.

The closest I’ve come to seeing a ghost was when I saw Helen at a family wedding. It was a year or two after my grandmother passed away, and suddenly there she was - my grandmother - standing in front of me. After a moment of shock, I registered the red hair and realized that no, this was Helen – she shared my Mimi’s face, but the signature hair color was all her own.

My mom would call her “a special lady” with fondness and a smile; my uncle would describe her as “a tough old bird” and he meant it with respect. He got a kick out of her. When he visited her in the hospital last year, following serious surgery, he asked if he could get her anything and she replied, “Yeah, get me a beer.”

Come to think of it, the last time I saw Helen she was sitting across from me at the kitchen table that had once belonged to my grandmother, drinking a beer.

Are these, then, my only salient memories of this woman, my great-aunt? It unnerves me a little, to think that I am carrying forward not 88 years worth of remembered struggles and successes, not knowledge of her character or disposition, not stories of what she did during the war or what she thought of Elvis & Kennedy, but rather only…the image of a beer-drinking red-head.

I was about to get all dramatic, bemoaning memories lost to time and the fleeting, transient nature of our personal experiences in the annals of human history and all that jazz. Those lamentations probably stem as much from fear that memories of my own life will one day be lost, as from my uneasiness over missing memories of Helen. But while it’s true that our lives on earth are fleeting, our memories & the minutiae of our lives are not really ever lost, are they?

I may have only been given the beer-drinking red-head image of my aunt to carry forward, but another niece may know a story of Helen’s first job and first car, and her son knows what kind of mother she was, and someone else somewhere else remembers her sense of humor. Certain pieces of our lives – some big, some small – are deposited in the minds of those around us to carry forward. Perhaps a bigger comfort, though, comes in knowing that not one detail of our life is ever lost, but is instead collected, in a treasured sum total, in the loving mind of God.

BACK

I'm back from a long weekend at home for Thanksgiving, and I think my back may be broken. Ok, it's probably not broken, but after a morning spent raking leaves in my parents' yard, muscles I never knew existed are aching & shouting at me every time I move.

It's not a terribly terrible pain, though - and it's a reminder that I participated in that age-old suburban autumnal experience: first admiring the golden-hued leaves as they cling to the trees, then cursing them once they're on the ground requiring disposal.

The funny thing about my parents' back yard is that it just keeps shrinking and growing ever more foreign. Time was, I knew every inch of it - the number of steps from my swing set to the prickly holly bush, and how to avoid tripping over the dead tree stump when sneaking out of the basement door in the middle of the night. (mmm...hope my parents aren't reading this :) But as I stood there raking yesterday, the yard felt small and unfamiliar. I couldn't picture what lay beneath the leaves - where was that stump? Where does the path to the woods start? Hey - what happened to my swing set!?

It's a strange feeling - revisiting the places of your past and finding them unfamiliar. When I'm home, I sometimes let myself go tripping through memories and drive by my old school, or by the house of a friend who doesn't live there anymore, or by some other landmark of my youth. Each time I go expecting to feel something - a tangible ghost to rise up and douse me in nostalgia and sadness for days-gone-by. But most times I don't feel anything. I just stare blankly at the building/road/lot before me, remember the events that once transpired there, and think, "Huh."

So, yes. I've been thinking about feelings and memories a lot lately; perhaps a topic for a separate blog-post. Happy post-Thanksgiving! Wishing you easy adjustments back to reality.