Category: Nostalgia

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Heather-Marie

Women-ProfileEven her name was an enigma. I always imagined her parents battling it out over a particularly long game of canasta. “I want to name her after my mother, god bless her soul, she died when I was 6 but there was no greater saint!” her mother had probably argued. Not to be outdone, her father contended with, “She has to be named after my sister who took the cloth and is serving as a missionary to Africa.” And because neither one wanted to back down they compromised as couples often do, saddling their lone child with the name of Heather-Marie.

Now don’t get me wrong. It is a lovely name, both parts of it. Heather reminds me of beautiful flowers blowing in the breeze on an autumn day, and Marie is the girl who everybody likes, the quiet, self-assured angel with the killer smile. Together the names should have been magic, but no one explained this to Heather-Marie.

I met her in the midst of my longest summer. My heart had just been crushed by the woman I thought would be my forever and I was in what I felt was eternal pain. Amazingly enough, Heather-Marie became my salvation, but not at all in the manner that I had intended. And it all began with a band. And the internet. And the fact that I couldn’t drive. But I’m getting ahead of myself. This post isn’t about me. It’s about Heather-Marie.

She was an aerobics instructor at a gym, and as a result she was one of the fittest people I had ever met. I was fresh out of adolescence and my metabolism was working overtime, so I thought I could do pretty much any exercise even though I wasn’t quite in shape. It’s what I told her during our first phone conversation, when I was bragging about still living with my mom and never getting my driver’s license. Oh, and it’s also when she told me she went to a nudist camp once.

I liked her at once because she was brutally honest, even from the start. She also had absolutely no problem with picking me up and taking me somewhere, or even that I still lived with my mother. The age difference, though, that gave her pause. You see, I was 20 and she was 28, and she worried that even though we seemed compatible over the phone that her advanced life experience would cause problems for us in the “real world.” Luckily for me that wouldn’t end up being a problem. Nor would our difference of skin color. Yeah, she seemed like a perfect match.

But then life went into fast-forward, we had about 10 more phone conversation, and our first date was finally staring us in the face. Go figure, Heather-Marie hit it off with my mother, who was entranced by her tales of teaching spinning class. I think she would have signed my mother up on the spot if I hadn’t hurried her out of there. We had an amazing time, too. The meal was great, the conversation sparkling, and I believe I even made her forget all about the age difference. We went on a long walk and the words kept flowing. I felt that spark that I hadn’t since my relationship had fizzled earlier that year. It went by way too quickly, though. Continue reading “Heather-Marie”

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The Year I Was the Easter Bunny

rubies-easter-bunny-costumeI should have known better after the Santa Claus debacle, but apparently I hadn’t learned a thing because less than four months later there I was in an Easter Bunny costume. I have absolutely no idea how they talked me into it, honestly. All I know is that one day my boss was hinting around about having something special planned for Easter, and the next he was showing me this giant head. And boy was it heavy!

Just to get you back up to speed, I was working for the Philadelphia Vision Center during my senior year of high school handing out flyers in the outlying neighborhoods in the general vicinity of the Vision Center in Southwest Philadelphia. In addition to handing out those flyers, they had co-opted me into being Santa Claus for the previous holiday season, a thankless job with a beard that itched more often than not. So, there I was looking at a giant head that probably weighed more than a bowling ball, and I was honestly considering it.

For starters, they were going to pay me more for it, to the tune of a couple more bucks per hour, and I wouldn’t have to deliver flyers for two whole days. You see, there was some type of bazaar in a local school gym where all manner of businesses were invited and given tables to advertize. It was engineered as this amazing revitalization of the community and local business, although the local aspect of each business was debatable. It was for two days, the Thursday and the Friday before Easter, and the Vision Center had been invited.

Thinking back on it, I think the only reason we were invited was because of that Santa thing I mentioned earlier. My best bet was that the community action folk decided we would be the most probable to have an Easter Bunny costume. Go figure. And of course the getup required someone relatively tall to fit into it. Enter me. The dunce. Continue reading “The Year I Was the Easter Bunny”

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Every Picture

Every picture I’ve ever seen of myself tells a story. Sometimes that story is a wonderful one of redemption and joy, but other times it’s the story of a boy fighting against himself, trying futilely to get somewhere. Still other pictures bring back memories of times and people that have been long gone. Some names I don’t even recall, but their faces ring true all this time later. We had that moment. We shared at least the amount of time necessary to seal that memory behind glass for the world to see.

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Me and my big sister.

Out of all the people I’ve taken pictures with, the one who appears the most in those photographs with me is my sister. We are only 15 months apart in age, and many people assumed we were twins back then (much to her chagrin — she’s the older one). But we took a host of photographs together, many that still exist to this day. I think it’s because our parents (but mostly our mother) decided she wanted to chronicle our growing up years. Isn’t that why most parents pick up a camera in the first place?

I have pictures of us from Florida, with huge Mickey ears plastered to our sweaty foreheads. And there are pictures of us at Dutch Wonderland, posing next to Barney Rubble, looking like rubes. Still other pictures are random ones from around the house in Southwest Philly, us posing by not posing. Mixed in are also the stock photographs we would take every few years in the back of the grocery store where the picture people would set up shop. I wore ties for those. I am smiling in all of them. I love my sister, and it shows through even back then when I tried to be mewed up to my heaviness. Continue reading “Every Picture”

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Jay’s Lakers

Magic Johnson 1987 NBA FinalsIt was the summer of 1987, before the rise of the internet and 9/11, before the music of Nirvana and Dave Matthews, even before the popularity of the taco bell dog and Beverly Hills, 90210. In fact, my family had just gotten an Apple 2-C computer, on which we could play such illustrious games as Agent U.S.A., The Oregon Trail, and Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? I was supposed to be selling magazines that summer, but that job was cut short when I proved to be an awful salesman. So, my mom shipped me off to Laurel Lake Camp for two weeks.

The camp itself was a marvel, on a large-sized property in mid-western Pennsylvania. It was a Christian enterprise, so the activities were geared towards not only having fun but also all about including room for Jesus to shine through. We stayed in cabins that seemed as if they had been on the property since Taft was president, the boys on one side of the property and the girls on the other. While we were all pretty young, it was still at that age when we were first beginning to notice girls as more than just bothersome.

Each cabin was instructed on the first evening at camp to come up with a name in time for the bonfire, to be shared with the rest of the camp. It would be our official cabin name for the duration of the two weeks, so they gave us half an hour to spitball and come up with pure gold. Well, we did the spitballing, but it was near impossible to agree on a name.

There were 8 guys in our cabin, and it was the second one from the end of the row, so we threw around names like 8 Dudes, Cabin 2, and No Name Cabin. Honestly, those were our choices. It didn’t help that we had just met each other that day, so no one was really willing to step out and be the leader during the process. Our counselor was probably about 8 years older than we were, but he seemed ancient to us at the time, and his name was Jay. Just before we had to leave to head to the bonfire this kid named Tony spoke up.

“Um, you guys like the Lakers?”

“Sure. Magic Johnson is amazing.”

“So, why can’t we just be Jay’s Lakers?”

“Uh, because our counselor’s name is Jay?”

“Why not?”

“Sure.” Continue reading “Jay’s Lakers”

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Empty

indexThe house was empty, it seemed, save for the history that so obviously still resided within its graffitied walls. Its floors were piled high with rubbish, almost as if a dumpster had been upended above them, but peculiarly the refuse had no noticeable scent. Either that or my sense of smell just wasn’t good after being in the house for more than five minutes. The stairs leading upward were rotten from the bottom up, a sure sign that no one was up there.

It was a Saturday. I was 16 or 17 — probably 17 — and it was a late spring afternoon in North Philadelphia. We were supposed to be in church, the five of us, wiling away the afternoon before the vesper service at sunset, but we were squirrely. Our parents were all otherwise occupied (having large scale conversations, sleeping in the kindergarten classroom, eating lunch, or in one of the various meetings that would crop up), and we were old enough to be on our own. So we did some exploring.

North Philadelphia was entirely run down in those days — in the early-90s — so it wasn’t hard to find some abandoned houses to explore. The hard part was making sure our nice church clothes didn’t get ruined from the experience. We would actually pick up some non-church kids along the way, gathering steam and people for a major expedition some days.

The kids from North Philly were a lot more world-weary than we were, even though we were the same age. There’s something to be said for growing up in the ghetto, with no pretense that there was something more to the world. They lived in the world of drug deals, drive-by shootings, and five families living in one row home. Continue reading “Empty”

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The Absence of Her

I still think of her sometimes, even seventeen years later. She comes to me in dreams every few months, looking just as she did then, with a questioning look in her eyes, before fading away yet again. But she also slides into my thoughts in the daytime hours, while I’m doing mundane things, like driving … Continue reading The Absence of Her