A short story lesson: Chasing the past does not lead to the future.
The summer sun burns through the hazy atmosphere searing my skin. No amount of shade or gentle breeze can cut the sharp blade of heat and humidity. Sweat drips from my forehead. The salt burns my eyes and lips. The heat radiates off the inky black Bensonhurst pavement making the street a like soft caustic syrup. It’s the Fourth of July, the biggest official summer holiday and the only day of the year I silently suffer through the oppressive heat. Every other summer day, I long for Autumn.
I’m sitting on a broken park bench on the bike path under the Verrazano bridge adjacent to the Belt Parkway. The whooshing sound of traffic behind me keeps me from hearing the waves washing up on the rocks below. I reflected on the day as it unfolded.
Your tour guide awaits…
Today, I went through the neighborhood I grew up in silently and singly commemorating events of the past like a spectral tour guide through a graveyard. I do this every year though I know this kind of past-stalking can’t be good for the mind. There’s nothing back there. I don’t know what or who I expect to find.
Being the 4th of July, the day culminates in the annual fireworks display Macy’s puts on over the East River. I never actually get to see anything because I have a knack for avoiding success, the kind of success that lets you view the fireworks from an air conditioned apartment on the Upper East Side or from a hipster rooftop party in Williamsburg.
Instead, I crowd in with the masses on the closed highways like the 3rd class steerage passengers on the Titanic. Neck deep in sweat that may not be mine and the traffic nightmare after the finale. It’s like being on the set of a disaster movie that’s actually my life.
Memories are a wonderful but they are also cruel.
They take you where there is no pain, only familiar times free of responsibility and hardship. Memories are like a vacation from the life that didn’t go as planned. They also bring an overwhelming longing and emptiness for days gone by and people no longer here.
I took my bike this morning because the streets are empty.
It’s one of the only days you can do that around here. Armed with an ice cold bottle of water that would soon be too hot to drink, I left for the first of many stops. I went by my father’s house first. It looks the same as it did two years ago when I gathered his stuff after the funeral. His wife still lives there but we were never that close. I almost wish she moved away so I could knock on the door and ask for a moment to reminisce. The same old metal Venetian blinds hung in the single pane windows. The same little out-dated air-conditioner stuck out the makeshift Plexiglas panel he made.
The bench on the porch is still falling apart after decades of use. We spent many long hot days on that old wooden bench. All the friends I ever knew, all the aunts, uncles and cousins I can remember spent time on that porch in the span of 60 years. The bitter taste of change lingers.
I went to all the old places I spent time growing up. I half expected to smell the gunpowder hanging heavily in the stagnant air. Those days are long gone. There are no more local fireworks shows or kids launching bottle rockets and jumping jacks. Those were the days of open fire hydrants and roving ice cream trucks, cruising in patched up muscle cars and dreaming the nights away on the front porch. I guarded these places like the Custodian of Precious Memories.
They’re all gone now, my friends and my family.
I can call them out by name and there would be nothing on the wind calling them back. In search of something better, I left here once and wasn’t smart enough to stay away. I should have kept going but I turned around. There should have been something for me to come back to, some furious burst of energy that would sustain me for the life I chose. It seems like a foolish notion now. I was arrogant enough to think people would be waiting for me to pick up where we left off. They all moved on without me, moved out to the suburbs to make new lives with new friends and families. They all exchanged their dreams for a mortgage and a career while still I searched. Which of us is the wiser?
Now I stood alone guarding all those memories, the last hold out on an oppressively hot day. All I saw were the ghosts of the past as I wandered the streets protecting the neighborhood as if they’d all come back.
I wheeled past the stores that went away, replaced by whatever new business this incarnation of my old neighborhood supports. The movie theater, where I spent every Saturday afternoon dreaming of becoming an actor, where I took my wife on our first date, is gone. Now a department store, I watched as they threw the balcony seats piece by piece into a dumpster. Memories easily discarded in the name of progress.
The strip we cruised, waiting to be discovered, is gone. There are a slew of new businesses, new immigrants, new kids making this neighborhood their own. Paving new memories over mine, walking through the shadows of the past.
I don’t know what I’m keeping watch over.
Nostalgia is long gone and in it’s place a kind of numb awareness that I am chained here serving penance for leaving early. This is a spent territory.
I rode my bike back home through old familiar streets without looking up. There were no familiar faces. No one to call me from a porch or pull me into the old street ball game of Kings. The Kings are dead.
I dragged the bike up the stairs into the apartment and out to the small balcony serving as my perch. I felt the familiar kiss on my forehead as I stared out at my Empire of Nothing- In-Particular. We had dreams that somehow got lost in the shuffle of “doing the right thing” (for everyone but us). The result was nothing but regret and pile of costly mistakes.
I went to the bedroom to hide from the rest of the day. Taped to the wall a fading map of the country with little pins in all the places we wanted to see. I kept telling myself one day I’d have enough money to take us where we (and only we) want to go without looking back.
The map looked back as it always did. There is nothing left to protect or preserve, the natural course of things has seen to that. One day fill a suitcase and tell her we’re going. She’ll look at me like I’m nuts. Doesn’t matter.
Let’s see how far we get this time…
Tom Serafini is a writer, illustrator, motivator of dreamers from Brooklyn, New York. His first illustrated picture book, Ollie Bug and the Icky Sticky Thing From Space, will be funded through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign coming soon.
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