Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 7, 1994 TAG: 9408090015
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Elizabeth Strother
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
OK, SO Thomas Wolfe was right. You can't go home again. There is no flying back unchanged through the intervening years to people and places that remain just as you left them. But you can come close.
Darned close.
I went to St. Louis this summer, something I had sworn never to do since I moved away. Hot and muggy were bearable when I was a kid - uncomfortable, sure, but redeemed by tree-shaded tea parties, and games of hide-and-seek that stretched from cool twilight till bedtime.
A child's summer and an adult's summer are different seasons, pure and simple, and this visit, I knew, would not see a repeat of those desultory pleasures. What I remembered vividly about St. Louis summers as an adult was hot air so weighted with humidity it seemed to suck the oxygen right out of my lungs.
Yet here I was, in July, back in the old neighborhood and in my mom's little frame rancher, next door to the old, two-story house where I grew up and where my brother Jon now lives. Mother is ailing, and he and his family needed a break from looking after her. Family duty - and love - brought me back here. Filial piety, the nuns used to call it, I thought, and realized I was starting to think in almost forgotten schoolgirl terms.
It was the neighborhood and, more particularly, the house. It is so like my friend Pamela's house when we were kids. When we weren't on the outs, I spent as much time there as in my own. That house is next door, actually, in the other direction from Jon's, and it was remodeled years ago. This one started out virtually identical, and is largely unchanged.
The Zemans haven't lived next door for years, but Pam's youngest brother, Tim, recently moved with his wife and her two small daughters into an apartment across the street, a boon for my two young nieces. The Zeman girls and the Strother girls are playmates again, my brother had told me with amusement. Pam and her family visited frequently, and she wanted to see me when I came to town.
I thought that'd be fun, but ... I'd been through reunions before - the quick scan to note weight gain, crow's feet, chin sag, the cursory recounting and comparison of life histories thus far. I carefully packed a favorite pants outfit so I'd look my best, but casual, like I wasn't really trying.
Such artifice has always been lost on the rest of my family, so it was not surprising when Jon burst in on our supper one night and said he had seen Pam at Tim's place, and I should hurry on over there if I didn't want to miss her. Great. There I sat, barefoot, in green shorts and a purple T-shirt, both of which I was wearing for the second day in a row. Should I change? Sure, if I wanted to look like an idiot who cooked everyday family meals and washed up the pots and pans in a nice hostess outfit.
Besides, I didn't know how long she'd been there or how long she'd stay, so I headed on down the driveway and across the road. I got halfway up the walk to the apartment building when the door swung open. Pamela bounded out at her familiar gallop, stopped short and threw her arms out wide.
"Elizabeth Jean," she yelled, "come here!" Incredible. It was the same old Pam. There was no cool once-over to assess appearances, just a fierce hug.
Mrs. Zeman, her blond hair now gray; a sweet, smiling Bill; solemn, dark-bearded Timothy - they were all there, except, of course, Mr. Zeman, who had died some years ago, and Kath. Kathy lives "up north" now, Pam explained - meaning, I understood, not north as in Wisconsin or Minnesota, but in the northern suburbs of St. Louis County, a place of great psychological distance from South St. Louis city and county.
OK, one hurdle cleared; they were all as comfortable to be around as when I used to sit at their kitchen table eating spice cookies shaped like windmills. Now there was the reminiscing; I love my memories of childhood, and didn't want to find that I had made them up, somehow, over the years.
Did a half-dozen or so of us kids really climb up in that old mulberry bush in Jon's back yard, I asked, eyeing it doubtfully. I recall us scrambling around and perching on those branches like some large species of featherless bird. Yep, Pam said, we did that all the time.
She remembers, she said, how our mutual friend, Paula, used to demand that she ignore me at times and play exclusively with her because I went to Catholic school and they to public. This had nothing to do with religious prejudice and everything with a child's exercise of power and control. She often wonders, Pam fretted, why she let herself be manipulated that way. I was surprised she ever gave it a thought, and said, truthfully, that after all these years, I did not.
I do have a vague memory, though, of being about 3, and Mother telling me a family with a girl my age had moved in down the block. I was too shy to present myself to strangers, but I went and played in the sandbox at the top of the hill in back of her house. Before long, a little girl came up, stood at the side of the box and waited (in vain) for an invitation, then climbed in. And we started playing. That had to be her, I said.
She didn't remember.
But in the course of our rambling recollections, that evening and a few days later, when I put on the outfit that I was determined to wear and drove to her home for lunch, she mentioned that we had lucked out. She lives in a much nicer house now, with her husband and two boys. But we grew up in a neighborhood where we were all free to be just ourselves.
That is exactly how I remember it: very different personalities with very different strengths and interests and dreams, but - except for the occasional snubbing - known and accepted as ourselves. A real cast of characters. It was great.
by CNB