Memory Lane

Make today great. We may be products of our past but we are also architects of our future. ~Pastor Tim Clowers

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Are you the kind of person that likes to stroll down memory lane, remembering the old high school, the old friends, the past that eluded your future you thought would manifest?

I’ve never been one who held onto the past like a warm cup of tea. You know, cradle it in my hand, coddle the thoughts as if they were precious and needed to be gently stirred whenever the feeling arises?

No, I’m a writer. I’ve stirred all my emotions with a pen. Laid them onto paper to be read by some unsuspecting reader of the future who happens to like pain and misery. They’ll drink the tea of my past, swallow it and either regurgitate it for the simple fact that the truth can not be stomached, or swallow the warm drink and find that it has become poison in their system.

I was asked if I missed my past life. Which one? The one prior to me being born? Yes, because it was heaven. The one prior to me coming to Nebraska? In my honesty, I have to admit, no. I miss a few family members but that’s about all that I miss.

I went back home a few years ago to Baltimore. Thinking foolishly again that I might have been missed to some extent. I was there because of my mothers medical problem, she had had a stroke and mis-communication from everyone had her on her deathbed, when in reality she had a stroke and wanted me there to be with her, just in case.

Did everyone come out of the woodwork to see me? No, just my sister, who I saw at the hospital a few times and my  niece who found her way to my hotel to visit with me. She was living at  her dad’s home with her husband and five siblings. Going through a ton of her own stuff, I made my way to see her and her brothers and sisters.

Memory lane was a hard stroll. I visited my bro and his wife and she berated me for the way my mother treated me like a precious gem and my brother got the treatment of a bullfrog. This is not quite how I remember it, but I took it all and brought all the agony of the visit back to Texas where I went on a healing binge.

Unfolding in my memoirs is the story of a young girl, who was taken to bars to sit with a bunch of men as mother and dad drank, the brothers were all off on their own escapades. I’ll go down the lane and talk of the many nights we sat at neighbors houses because of parental arguing and small daughters clinging to the mother by her housecoat as she fled.

I’ll also revel in the many joyous Christmas’ that the children were given. Were our parents perfect? No! Did the children have everything they ever needed, yes. But we needed love and that was the instrumental element that was missing in all of the kids life. Did I get more love than the others? Maybe because I was the baby, and clung to my mother like a wet noodle to a ceiling.

Each of us has a different tale to tell. My past is where I want it, in the past, not part of my future. It molded me and shaped me, but as I let it go, I release my pain, I am healed as I walk down memory lane, the one I create, to become my future.