Drive-by Memories

The yellow street sign warned: “Stop ahead,” so I tapped my brakes, bringing my car to a complete stop at the intersection. I glanced to my left before releasing the breaks and stepping on the accelerator.

Then it hit me.

No, it wasn’t another vehicle. It was a series of scenes from the past, swirling around my car, streaming by me one by one and all at once, hurling me back in a time warp before swooshing past my car like a comet, leaving me craning my neck to grasp another glimpse as I idled by.

I was passing the house we lived in seven years ago. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been that way since we had moved. But for some reason today was different.

Caught up in a past moment, it’s suddenly a time when it’s just the kids and me living in the house. On the front porch I’m checking the mailbox, anxiously awaiting the mail, anticipating a letter from Lori, who was then living in Edmond, Oklahoma. I had gotten her address when I saw her in a restaurant while I was visiting back home. Stumbling through my “Hello, how are you?” I stalled, trying to think of a way to get her address without her thinking I was trying to get her address. “So, can I put you on our church’s mailing list?” It was the best I could muster. It worked. I don’t remember if I ever got around to the newsletter, but I did write her. And so, there I am on the front porch, one hand holding the front door open, the other hand searching in that mail box for her letter.

That’s what I saw when I drove by.

Then, around the corner in the back yard, it’s suddenly a few years earlier, and Dave is throwing the shot put, training for the thirteen year old regionals of the AAU Track Meet in West Virginia. Before it was over, the shot put had divotted holes over most of the yard so that a stranger might surmise that a herd of wooly mammoths had stomped through eons ago, or maybe some aliens from outer space had misfired their laser guns and splattered the yard.

That’s what I saw when I drove by.

Then I fell further back it time, still in the back yard, only now Dave, Mary, my brother, Mark, his wife, Joy and all their kids--- Tangie, Melanie, and Brian, are throwing the football around. Moments earlier Mark had randomly announced, “Hey, let’s go throw some passes,” just as he had done hundreds of times when we were growing up, in hopes that I would become a decent football player, only now he said it, not randomly as we had thought, but to lift the somberness that had settled around our house like a heavy fog because it’s the afternoon of the day we buried my wife, Katri. We are running after the ball, laughing despite the pain of that day, and I’m hoping no one trips in one of the shot put holes and breaks a leg, sending us to the emergency room on the same day as the funeral.

That’s what I saw when I drove by.

Glancing back, because I’ve almost driven to the next house now, Katri is trying to walk up the ramp that the loving men of our church had built for her, since she could no longer step up the back porch. With the walker in front of her, she clickity clacks it along as she struggles. And I’m watching. And then I can’t.

That’s what I saw when I drove by.

Then, we are in our cars, leaving that house for the last time. I see Lori, Dave, Mary, Harrison, and Madison, and of course the Schnauzers, Skittles and Casey. Harrison and Madi don’t remember much about that house, since they were there only a few months, but Dave and Mary probably do, and as we drive away, Mary peers straight ahead, but Dave asks me to stop the car so he can run back in and take one more look at his old room before we drive away onto a new and very different avenue of life, a life that speeds by quicker than you can read the street signs as you enter the next new town.

Or drive by your old house.

And that’s what I saw when I drove by.