Another Country

When I was a really little kid, men wore hats.  They also wore ties, usually black, and crisp white shirts with dress pants.  Most men had the same haircut my father sported at the time; short on the sides and flat on the top.  Women wore a lot of dresses back then and they wore little white gloves when they went, "downtown."  Despite eating a lot of casseroles with questionable ingredients and smoking two packs of cigarettes a day, all the grown-ups seemed like they knew what they were doing.  They were adults in every sense of the word.  They were in charge.  They had it figured out. Or they would; if you'd just give them a minute, goddamn it.  Men in white shirts and black ties got us to the moon.  And back.  I remember it well. 

They're dying off; that generation.  My parents are gone and so are a lot of their friends.  My mother, a few years before she passed said, "You know, I sometimes wonder if my friends think I'm in Hell since I haven't shown up in Heaven yet."  

I'm sure they were pleased when she finally arrived. 

It's another country, the past.  A foreign land you can't visit anymore; like Cuba.  A place people of a certain age lived that's somewhat similar but also very different than where I live now.  I see reminders of the old country and it makes me feel lonesome for home that doesn't exist.  I never was one for forward, future thinking.  Even if it did have jet packs.  Even if I got to be an astronaut and eat as many Pillsbury Food Sticks as I wanted. 


I'm ten years old and I'm with my family driving to church.  I'm sitting in the middle seat, next to both of my parents.  Someone has put soap into the fountain over at The Fountains apartments.  Again.  Great billows of fluffy white foam fill the corner of Slater Avenue and Bushard Street.  It looks amazing.  I suspect my brothers had a hand in this but I say nothing.  If they did do it, I think to myself, I wish that they had taken me along.


I'm thirty-five years old.   The girls are in the backyard playing together in the inflatable swimming pool.  I can see them from the kitchen where I'm washing the breakfast dishes.  It's a bright, sunny summer day.  I can smell the sunscreen I put on them all over my shirt.  Coppertone.  I smell like the summers of my own childhood.  I turn the handle on the faucet down slightly so I can enjoy listening to the girls giggle and splash.  


I'm seventeen years old and I've told my parents that I was spending the night at my friend's house but I'm really with my boyfriend.  It's one in the morning and we're at Naugles.  I'm having the Mexican Salad and a Coke.  I'm hoping that we don't get in accident or do anything stupid that will get us caught.  I don't feel even remotely sorry about lying to my parents and I don't want to have to fake up feeling sorry to them.  


I'm three years old and I'm sitting under my mother's hair dryer.  She has put Dippty-Do in my hair and used her prickly black hair rollers.  I've probably been sitting there for 3 minutes and already I'm bored out of my brain.  She sees me fidgeting, crouches down to me and sings, "Would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar..."  



I'm nine years old and I'm biking home through Fulton Elementary School.  The sun is setting and the grass is freshly mowed.  I can smell it.  It smells like spring, and California, and recess, and happy possibilities.  For the rest of my life, whenever I smell cut grass, I will think of this moment.  As I pass the baseball backstop, I hear the whoosh of the sprinklers come on.  I'll get home before it's officially dark.  I'll sit at the table, on the bench next to my brother Greg.  We'll have ham and potato casserole.  Weber's bread and butter and glasses of Jerseymaid milk.  A night much like a thousand other nights in my childhood.   


And that's how life goes.  A lot of the time life feels like nothing special but you can't see it while you're in the midst of it.  You're too close.  When you stand back from it, when it becomes out of reach, you learn how wildly precious it is.