old pals
Every now and then the Past comes calling. We have old friends who, like family, invite themselves, their kids, their kids’ kids and now grandkids, dogs, other friends, the whole menagerie, all looking for a South End Get-Away from their humdrum, their psychotraumas, their own Present. I’m not sure what they see in our Shangri-La-La here, but they’ve watched it for over 30 years grow from a blackberry and nettle menaced world of shacks and varmint to whatever it’s become now. They came then and they come now….
I’m a nostalgic S.O.B. if you want to know the truth. The South End for me is really the place I came to in 1977 as a lost soul, an unemployed bum, a failed writer, a boy just divorced. As bleak as my old shack looked in the dreary winter I came, it was a salvation, a safe harbor, a new beginning. Maybe we always get second chances, but I didn’t think that was necessarily so back then. I thought if I could just have one more chance…. If I could just learn from my many mistakes, if I could just re-start, if I could just sit down and put the pieces back together in a better way….
My old friends remember the old me. They bring that mirror along with the fine wines and specialty chesses, the hundreds of stories of our wild days they see as their mythology. They moved on to careers and family. Me, I moved here. I dug further into the wild. I suspect I remind them of their youth, even though we all have grown old. But the real truth is, we are the kids we were then, grown along different paths. We hold mirrors to these others and imagine different destinies.
If we did it right, we’re glad we’re not them. They’re old friends. They’re our past and of course our present too. We’ve grown older than we wished and maybe not so wise as we’d hoped. We’re like the roots of ancient trees wrapped into one another, those trees all pushing toward the light above, all leaning on each other.
We’re an odd little woods.
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