What Jogg'ed Memory

It began Christmas Day, 1995. I stood on the sidewalk, buried in my coat and gloves, watching as my parents cursed the four feet of snow that encased the Dodge Dynasty. After an hour or so of exuming, my father climbed in the car and unsuccessfully tried to spark the ignition.

Ten minutes later, Emerett Parson from downstairs and one wall over was giving us a hand, juicing our car. And then we were on our way. It was the last time I would ever live in Brooklyn, New York.

We made it to New Jersey and stayed the night with my grandmother. In the morning, my parents rememberd they'd forgotten the lockbox and went running back to the Belt Parkway and Brooklyn.

But damn it! Enough of the Past! Enough of it! Enough of it! Enough of the goddamned Past!

And those were the last momenets--me--standing in the snow.

Me.

Standing in the snow and it melts around to water until the Mason-Dixon line.

They said the ocean was 85 degrees Fahrenheit when we arrived. No more winter clothes. December 27. But I don't rmember going to the ocean then. I don't remember.

We ran into the house. A house. No more inner city apartments. Rowhouses. My brothers ran along behind me. Into the house.

Rented, of course--but a house. Date palm in the front, magnolia beside it. And we looked out the wall-window from our knees on the oatmeal floor at the sunny, burning street.

And we didn't go to the ocean.

I walked along the lip between the grass and the gutter, and I found a boy across the street but I didn't find a friend.

Later, he went away from his father and stepmother. Eventually, two more children were born, but Terri wasn't there. I became friends with his stepmother--Charlene--if a person 21 years or more older than you can be called a friend when you're 11.

She said he had to go because he never quite got over the death of his mother from two or three years before--maybe more, but I can't remember now. Ten years is a long time. I guess two years is, too.

His mother was crossing the street--going home, maybe, or to lunch--when an eighteen-wheeler came by.

Sometimes paths corss too closely. Sometimes too closely.

So the boy who never became my friend got sent away to learn to cope with his mind--and the memory of his mother and the truck that took her life.

* * *

I climbed the magnolia tree. Fifty feet wide and fifty feet up. This is the first time I've metioned it. But Bob said he hated children in his tree.

"No monkeys in my tree."
"Sorry. Sorry."
"Git out. No climbin in my tree."

So for the rest of the time, I only imagined.