Remembering

Do you ever get that hurt in your heart at the thought that your childhood, all the events and trips and holidays and friends that formed and define who you are today, are finished. It's a strange feeling, one that i only recently started having, but it comes on me like a mini panic attack. Maybe it's the fact that I am past the 30 mark, and into the 31 year mark, or maybe it's wondering if my children are going to have the same happy childhood memories I did. Some days when I think back on my youth, I forget the actual number  of years that have past. And when I remember, I get hit with waves of nostalgia.... and a little sadness...

I grew up outside Los Angeles, in a city that while big, felt small. With only 2 high schools and 3 middle schools, you were almost guaranteed to know pretty much everyone by the time you became a junior in high school. Not many of us moved away, and the ones that stayed are still friends. Some of them even got married to each other. I keep up with them on Facebook, and while I am blessed that I made the right choice in moving to Tennessee, some days I feel that hole even more. When I see my childhood friends, who have babies the same ages as mine, gather for birthdays and play dates, weddings and births, I feel that hole. I wonder if I should be there, finishing out my life with the same people I started it with. I only make it worse when I start thinking of all the things I will never do again...

I will never cram into the backseat of a car, and make the 5 hour trip to Lone Pine, California, for a western film festival with my parents. And I will never see the beach house in Ventura where weeks were spent without a TV, when the only entertainment was the beach, the pool, and wooden board games at night. I will never again walk down Orchard Drive to my friends house, and then sit out on the curb, goofing off until our parents call us in. Or walk with those friends to the weird smelling shop that housed a little lady who made creepy dolls, where we would walk to giggle at the porcelain faces and buy candies for a quarter. And the Pizza Pie outside pizza place, with the creepy guy in the grease stained shirt who sat in the back watching a small black and white TV, is gone, replace by an office building. And the train tracks we walked on to get to school have been made into a bike path. Time marches on.... I will never again leave school at lunch, climb into a friends car, and decide that driving to a friends house to go swimming is better than going to 6 and 7 periods. I will never walk the halls of the school I couldn't wait to graduate from. I never thought I would miss it.

And it really hurts that I will never lay in the bed, in the room that I lived in for my whole childhood, and stare at the crack of light coming under the door, letting me know my daddy was still sitting in his spot on the couch, under the brass standing lamp, reading his book, giving me comfort. I will never again lie in that bed, listening to old radio show programs on cassette tapes, of the Thin Man and The Shadow, complete with commercials for products from the 1950s and 60s.

I will never again hear the voice of my friend Jim, or the voice of Shirley, who taught me how to love horses. Two beautiful souls gone too soon.

I will never be 5, or 10, or 16, or 21 again.

But I will be 32, and 40 and 50, and older (God willing of course). I will torture my children with road trips of our own,  and ground them when they cut school. I will go to birthdays and graduations and weddings and the birth of my grandchildren. I will have all of these, and along the way, my children will make the memories that one day, will give them pangs of remembering.