A Sunday Drive Up and Down Memory Lane

I dropped T. Bone and Miss Bit off in their Sunday school classes after church. My hubby was in the middle of a grueling Little League draft and I just didn't feel like solo small talk in the parish center so I decided to take a drive. I had no plan, no route, no direction...what I had was about an hour. I found that each block held memories. I found myself remembering, reliving, laughing and even shedding a tear or two.

I drove up the lakefront and thought about all the times I spent on Bradford Beach with my friends getting burned to a crisp. Back then we lathered up with baby oil...forget the SPF anything. You can barely see the sand beneath the snow right now just like the time Jack and I climbed along the icy caverns huddled together for warmth, or like when I brought my friend Matthew who was visiting from Connecticut to see the frozen shores of Lake Michigan in early Spring. We took pictures of each other climbing over the the slippery, sharp ice caverns and killed time until it was time at last for him to head back East. It turned out that we weren't on the same page with regard to the nature or future of our relationship. I don't think I ever had the pictures developed and I haven't talked to him since.

I turned up the winding, tree-lined road that cuts up the bluff. My Dad, brother and I spent many a Saturday playing hide and seek in the woods that flanked this road. When I was little, the woods seemed so magical and vast and now at the tail end of winter I can see straight through them. It makes me sad. I pass the sign for the Bistro and I am taken back to a summer's night a few years ago when we were there celebrating someone's birthday over steak frites. Mine? My Mom's? Does it really matter?

As I drove along Downer, I smiled when I saw the coffee house that hubby and I often visited pre-kids for a Sunday breakfast. We lingered luxuriously long over lattes or mochas and the paper. A little further on down the road and I saw the candy wagon with the red striped awning that was the delight of my youth even though it's been replaced by a parking lot and now exists only as a figment of my imagination. It was the kind of place where you stood in line to get your penny candy on a hot summer night when life was so much simpler. I could almost taste the gritty sugar mixed in with a little leftover paper from a sheet of dots. My kids have never had those.

It struck me that my brother and I used to follow this same route when we would take the bus to spend the day with our Great Grandma at the Catholic Home. She'd be waiting for us all eager in the lobby. We'd spend the day being introduced to all the residents in between games of Yahtzee. Pearl's been gone for almost 17 years, but the home looks the same.

A little further south and I couldn't miss my Mom's favorite pizza place. Actually, it's a favorite of most people who have experienced it. Last winter we got into the habit of going to Saturday evening mass and then we stopped there for an early dinner a couple times. We'll have to do that again soon.

Before I knew it I was passing one of the coffee places my hubby and I frequent for this hour every week, and then I was back at church. The kids wanted to know what I did while they were in Sunday school. I told them I just took a drive. Miss Bit smiled and said more than asked, "Alone in the peace and quiet." Yes, alone with my memories.