.....memory lane

Yogis,
‘What do you think about taking a trip down memory lane today?’

It’s a gray dreary Thursday morning and that’s my mom as she comes down the steps. I had arrived at my parent’s house in NJ on Tuesday to spend a few days with them. I hadn’t seen them since Christmas, and it felt like it was time.

In many ways I already felt like I was on memory lane. Sleeping in my old house, being alone with my mom and dad, being cooked for, watching Jeopardy and laughing over old stories told one more time. No longer the one in charge I could lay back and go with the flow of whatever the new day offered.

‘Sure, I said. What do you have in mind?’

A few hours later we load into dad’s car and head down route 22 (a road I dreaded as a young driver) and turned off onto memory lane in Plainfield NJ. Our first destination……the apartment they moved into with me as a brand-new baby. It took a few times around the block and a couple of guesses to finally land on the big yellow house divided into individual apartments. Next stop…..the apartment we moved into not much later. It was the big front porch that let us know we had arrived in front of the right house. My parents were 25 and 28..

Next on the trip is the small cape cod they bought when I was two. This was the first single family house I ever lived in, the first one my mom ever lived in, and the first one my dad ever lived in. The cost was $17,000 and they had to lie a bit to get the mortgage. It looks even smaller than I imagined, but so cute.

We lived there a few years and I have some fleeting memories…..  Falling off my tricycle and skinning my knee. Getting bit on the nose by the dog next door when I got too close to the fence. Being chased by a squirrel as I tried to walk to the neighbor’s (you all heard that story when I recounted my second squirrel encounter last fall.) Why do we always remember the scariest moments?

We then stopped in front of the old brick house where my dad lived with my grandparents in the top floor apartment with a beautiful wood paneled ceiling and the master bedroom in a turret. I have wonderful memories of being there for family dinners and holiday gatherings. I remember watching Nixon resign on their large stand up B&W tv, my pop pop smoking a pipe in his armchair and my nana cutting up chicken livers for the cat Cleo.

Off we go, heading into downtown Plainfield to find the storefront where my mom and grandmother opened Glad Rags, a mod clothing store in 1965. While mom worked, I would play in the dressing room pretending it was a fort. She would give me money and I would walk down the street  alone to Texas Weiner to buy a Drakes coffee cake (remember them?) and an orange soda in a bottle with a straw. I was four. A different world back then.

We found them both! Glad Rags now empty but Texas Weiner alive and bustling. We went in and spoke with the current owner who has been there 35 years now. We told him stories from 56 years ago. My dad recounted stories from years even before that.

As I listened, standing in the exact same spot in front of the counter where I stood as a shy four-year-old little girl, I tried to remember how it felt. The same me looking through the same eyes but without decades of life layered on top. Memories flooded in.

My parents ordered two Texas weiners and brought them home for late lunch.

Nice to drive memory lane,
SARAH