Memories haunt, memories chase
Memories persist, cannot erase
Memories fade, memories shift
Memories cheer, in them we drift
I haven’t written poetry in a while. It is quite possible that I am not very good at it and tend to be overly sweet and sentimental. But as today’s thoughts and loosely associated by the title “memory,” how can I be anything but sentimental? So please excuse the bad poetry and let’s begin.
To say I had a hankering for a malted milk shake would be an understatement. I was virtually obsessed with reliving the taste. It’s like that with different seasonal items. I deprive myself of them the whole year so that I can partake of their delicacy with renewed vigor and appreciation. In the fall, it’s apple cider and powdered doughnuts. I don’t know how this combo came about, but that’s the way it is. Apparently, in the summer, it’s a malt. As I was saying, I was deeply craving the taste of a malt, but my wife couldn’t find any at our regular grocery store. So I set off last night to find some. Now I must preface this portion of my tale to let you know that Texas is ridiculously hot. 90-degrees-in-early-May hot. That simply ought not be. These crazy Southerners have come up with a way to combat this heat: they never expose themselves to it. (I’ll touch on that more in a bit.) When I entered the grocery store, I was struck by an icy blast. Said blast sent me reeling into a memory tailspin. Back in Chicago, our apartment in Roger’s Park had no air-conditioning. It was a beautiful corner apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows, and we usually had good breezes come wafting through. But on the really hot summer days, the stifling, asphyxiating-hot days, the air was still and felt like it could burst into flames at any moment, consuming you with you. On those days, HM and I would walk a couple blocks to our neighborhood Jewel-Osco grocery store. We didn’t have anything to purchase, no quest to fulfill, we just went there for some relief from the heat, because we always knew the store would be icy cold. I was reminded of this on my great malt quest. A good memory.
Our car is broken again. This morning I walked to the near-by house of a fellow teacher in order to hitch a ride. To do so I hopped a couple of fences…probably did a little trespassing. It was fun. These fences got me thinking about the “good old days.” In Lancaster, WI the only reason a house had a fence was to keep cows in. We ran amuck all over neighborhoods without a single obstruction. It was like an episode of “The Wonder Years.” Good days, good neighbors, no worries. To this day, there is not a single fence to separate yard boundaries between neighbors on my parent’s street in Shebly, OH. The whole town in like that. But step away from small-town America, and today in suburbia we’re not sure if we’re keeping the kids in or the weirdos out. Or maybe we’re keeping the neighbors at bay. Maybe we’re hiding ourselves away from any interaction. Maybe we’re just protecting our precious grass from being trodden on by impertinent, punk kids. Maybe the memory gets sweeter the further removed I am from the original events. But thinking of those days made me smile, and made me feel a good measure of remorse for the time and place in which my kids are growing up.
Walking to and from my coworkers house was almost therapeutic. I know in city-centers and in Europe…and among the Amish…walking is still essential, but here it is almost unheard of. Unless it’s exercise, in which case you must wear a really bad wind suit to proclaim your intentions. But it felt good to walk, to feel the ground under me, to feel the breeze, to experience the heat, to feel the sun shining down. As I mentioned before, we American’s so insulate ourselves from the outside world that we are strangers from it for most of our lives. Bill Bryson talks about it in rare comedic form in his book, “The Lost Continent.” We run from AC modified homes to climate controlled cars to AC modified workspaces, etc. I’m sure I’ve talked about it before. I just felt good, felt alive, felt energized by the experience.
Finally, while eating left-over pizza for lunch today, I was taken back to the first time I ever tasted Domino’s pizza. It was the L&K Motel in Shelby. While we ate, we watched Bill Cosby write with his magic pen on “Fat Albert” on the Nickelodeon network (that was a first, too). Dad was candidating, and we all went along for the ride. Shelby seemed like a metropolis compared to Lancaster. They had a stoplight and a fast food restaurant. That was a significant point in my life. Gone were the days of individual, localized tastes. No more “Pink Pony” or “Happy Joe’s.” The disease that had infiltrated Lancaster in the form of “Hardy’s” was already in Shelby, with greater strength. The corporate take-over of America has marched on, and I first tasted in when I was 8 years old.
So the memories end where they began: with a summer taste. Think of that thing which captures summer memories for you and go out and eat or drink a healthy measure of it today. Here’s to school almost being over and the glorious reign of summer soon to begin!
