I saw this about teen pregnancy at a Frayser school and even though I am no longer a teen, nor do I still live in Frayser, or Memphis, for that matter, it brought back a flood of memories about being a child growing up in that neighborhood, memories that moving thousands of miles away and living many years later have not vanquished.
My mother and I refer to the time we lived on Denver Street as if it were another lifetime, and it is surreal to believe that living there happened to us. Yes, living there is something that "happened."
I suppose just about everyone has memories of a childhood home, and mine are fraught with a bittersweet reverie for that lost time and a haunting that peppers my dreams with images of being hidden away in a brick house outside of which lurkers seek to invade me, and take away my security.
My 13th summer on this earth was spent standing, looking outside of a side door while holding a 9-iron golf club that belonged to my daddy. The TV set was on in the other room, but you never know if the bad guys are going to try to get into your house. They had before, while we weren't home.
At night, our 1940s house would creak. Every little sound kept me alert. One time I asked my daddy what would happen if someone tried to break in while we were in bed. He, without missing the proverbial beat, told me that he would take his 44 Magnum and wait at the end of the hall, right by the door to my bedroom, and shoot whoever had gotten in.
When I was a child, I can assure you, that was very small consolation.
As I got older, I heard stories about how nearby locally-owned gas stations were being robbed at gunpoint. Stores began to close. Later in dreams, these places, the local library where I had spent so much time, would become landmarks in a maze of a neighborhood in which I would become perplexed and lost, unable to make my way to my real home, where ever that may be in this country.
To the point now where my only dreams about the neighborhood I grew up in, Frayser, Memphis, Tennessee, are nightmares. I get trapped back there, back in the house I grew up in, and it becomes a phantasmic collage of things I once loved as a child.
Google Earth is truly a remarkable thing. I can go back to my old house and my old neighborhood now, and there aren't weird shapes, no traps, no misfigured dime stores, no labrynth-like streets that only loop back around to reconnect to their beginnings again.
Nope, I can zoom down and I only see trees, and the tops of the houses that belonged to my neighbors who by now have surely passed into the great beyond.
And the sad thing about Frayser, as I'm sure it is with many dilapidated cities and towns across the world, is that when you look at them from on high all you see is the green and the trees, and the rivers and houses, the occasional football field or baseball diamond, maybe even a swimming pool if you dare dip down far enough.
I wish I could look back at my hometown and only remember that there were rolling hills and great, strong trees that lined the little brick houses. I wish that were Frayser.
How do we ever get back home?
I send this diary into the cosmos, where it belongs, with my dreams.
(all apologies to my mother, who knows that a much less-hastily written version of this saga lurks within my brain, somewhere. Let's hope there's enough wine on this planet to draw it out of me. :)