Every Shalalala….It’s Yesterday Once More

“Google, play 70’s road music,” I said in the early morning mist of a Saturday morning as my car hit the road. For months, going on a year or more, I had this longing stir up inside my chest. I wanted to go home. It’s been 50 years since I followed my parents out of town in one of our two cars to make our way to Kentucky, ten years since I last went back. Carbondale had been the entire parameter of my world since the age of 3 1/2. My first McDonald’s hamburger rattled in the plain white sack my father and I brought back to the car. Imagine, a hamburger, just like that and we ate them together as we drove home. Carbondale is where the neighborhood kids all played outside until just before dusk when the mosquito truck started down the road spraying it’s death to bugs out the back of it and we thought ourselves brave to wait until just the last minute and then run to our houses for shelter and the nights’ end.

I started my school career in Carbondale at Winkler School. My father took the afternoon off of work to drive me the 100 miles, I thought, to the school building and meet my teacher the day before school began. It turns out the school was only a handful of blocks from where I lived and a galaxy away from my back yard. Mrs. Kincheloe was a dark haired, calm presence and I moved toward her in my little heart almost immediately. She made a post office out of huge refrigerator boxes and we got to “mail” packages and letters and have snacks and lay on a plastic mat each of our parents bought for nap time. It was red on one side and blue with stars on the other side. The blue side was my favorite. I had my first kiss right on my cheek from a boy named Billy and it would be my last until high school. I learned to love to read and my first word to sound out all on my own……”know”. The door to that little school was the first step into anything else I would ever learn. It was the biggest thing I’d ever done.

Next to the school lived my pediatrician, like the ones that used to make house calls on old t.v. shows. Dr. Geyer was kind and patient, fatherly. He wore dark rimmed glasses and his white coat comforted me. He had a gentle smile that calmed this fearful little girl. Just down from his house and my school was my church. You could see it from the playground. The light brown bricks, the steeple standing tall into the sky. I stepped inside the door of that church again just last week, first time in decades. The new pastor graciously took me on a tour. You know how you remember things bigger than they really were when you were a kid and then go back and stand in a miniature version of what you pictured? This was the opposite. The long hallway, with the distinctive brick red pattern on the floor loomed ahead of me like a red brick road into the future. It was then, as I stood in my own footprints from the past that I realized how formidable this place had been to who I have become.

The names rushed into my brain as I walked past my old Sunday School rooms; Mrs. Crenshaw, Mr. Cannon, Mrs. Aaron, Pastor Dillow…..all of them giants, legends in my mind. These folks had seen me through every Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday Night until I turned 18. There was Matthew, Mark, Luke and John…and there was Mr. Moore laughing with my father as they planned music for the next week, Mrs. Patton’s lovingly planned lessons with little gifts for each of us and warm hugs as we entered the class. Mr. Cannon and his sweet wife led our morning assembly and we sang songs and took turns taking up the offering. This Is My Father’s World was my favorite song. Mr. Cannon always had a twinkle in his eye and a “dad joke” before dad jokes were a thing. I heard myself reminiscing out loud and realized the pastor was capturing the look on my face as I spoke and smiling with me. I loved that he seemed to understand the weight that legacy leaves behind and was eager to stand on it for the future of my little town.

I said goodbye to my best little friend at church when I was 6. She had Disney blonde curls and a way about her that seemed older than she was. She got very sick and I saw the grown ups crying and whispering and felt sad when they told me she went to heaven. I wonder now how her parents must have felt watching me go on and grow without her.

I went to school with some of the same kids I went to church with and the strange social divide at school followed us to church. But there was one person who bridged the gap between popular….and me. Tina was vibrant, red headed, a cheer leader and friendly to everyone. We didn’t necessarily socialize on our own but one Sunday she walked up to me and put a gift in my hand; a small green plaque with a little girl standing shyly beside a flower. “Some friends are shy and need encouragement,” it said and I was stunned at being seen by a classmate who had no reason to see me. I thought of this and wanted you to have it, she told me and smiled. I still have it somewhere in a box. And I’m writing about it now. That’s the impact her action had, the contribution all those years growing into my own skin in a church family had of people who were as steady to me as concrete pillars. It was a place to keep my balance. I will find them in heaven one day and thank them for what I didn’t know I owed them and for what they had no idea they were providing.

We snapped a picture together and I told him that I would be back when the first service happened. I wanted to be there and whisper gratitude for my heritage. I want to be able to tell anyone who will listen that they are a part of a story that’s been written within those walls long before they walked in and if they listen closely they might here the echoes of women setting out the casserole dishes for potluck dinners, children’s choirs singing the Christmas program they had practiced for weeks, weddings that are now looking back on 50 years together. Memories and lives were being stitched and when it was happening it just seemed like any other day, until the days pile up and you stand there again 50 years later and remember and realize.

It’s a strange thing to drive by your grade school, your high school and see all, or parts of it, gone. It makes you want to stop the people walking by and let them know there used to be kids who looked longing out the window at the playground right where they are walking now and couldn’t wait for lunch and kids who lost the last of their baby teeth in the school cafeteria. Brush School is now where the library stands. It housed my 6th grade. My teacher was Mrs. Zunich of Yugoslavian descent. She was lively and learning felt like it breathed. She hand picked some students to learn Yugoslavian dances. I was one of them. I think now how much it meant to be picked out of the crowd for something. We had traditional costumes and the day arrived when we got in a school bus and drove to the local t.v. station and performed our dances on the morning show. It might as well have been Broadway, as far as I was concerned.

The 1930’s part of my high school was torn down a few years ago, all wide granite stairs and creaking wooden floors. I had Algebra in that building and the teacher would stop in the middle of class to go out in the hall and blow his nose during allergy season. I stood in front of the rest of building last week and it was June 1976 all over again and my dusty blue graduation gown was hot and the tassel was bobbing as my head turned to look around that night. This was it. This was where it all ended and began. It occurred to me I might never see some of these people again. I was right. Social media has done it’s best work in reuniting some of us, becoming the front porch we all needed to hear the rest of the story and how life has played out. A young woman walked by as I stood beside my car staring at the building and seeing a hologram of what used to be. “I went to high school here,” I announced to her. I needed her to know that for some reason. I needed to tell someone. She stopped and kindly talked with me. I thought to myself that she would probably go home to her husband and tell him about the “older lady” she met today and it made me smile, if not wryly. She doesn’t realize I’m still that 17 year old girl.

I graduated the same summer my father hung his PhD on the wall and began to dream about pastures in other places. The thought of not living in Carbondale took me by surprise. But I had a choice. I could either stay and go to college there or move with my parents. I knew a secret about myself. If I stayed, I’d never leave and, for me, that meant suffocation. I had to leave the comfort zone to find the rarified air I needed to thrive. It made me lightheaded just to think about it. So, me being an only child, I packed up all the treasures in my blue and white bedroom, said goodbye to my best friend and followed my parents out of town, snot and tears running down my face. I have never regretted it.

And now I sit, just a few days back in Kentucky from going home again. As I look at this picture of my dear friend, I see time wash over our faces. I didn’t have gray hair back in high school. Of course, I didn’t have purple hair either but only because I wouldn’t have had the courage to. I do now. Tina held out a nurturing welcome and I settled in her sun room and followed her around her garden and let her cats come and sit on my lap when they decided to pay attention to me. To a casual observer, we did nothing of importance. What was the big deal about this small college town that seemed trapped in the 60s//70s? I drove into her driveway and Tina walked around the corner and we gave each other a hug and didn’t let go right away. I was home again.

I drove home with the Carpenters playing. I remembered all the teenage angst that used to go with listening to them. “Long ago and oh, so far away….” I smiled through tears; the kind of tears that flow out liquid gratitude, the feeling of belonging, the sense that I’ll be back again and when I do, home will be waiting.