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Why do I remember almost every street, shop, and face that populated my boyhood but at times forget the names of people I have known for years? Yes, old age may make the past more vivid and give one entry into all sorts of minor episodes and encounters that lie deep in one’s past and simultaneously make one embarrassingly stumble over names that they know more intimately.
One of the few recent dreams I that I can remember is bumping into a neighborhood acquaintance from my childhood—a heavy, awkward boy—and taking a walk with him. We never spoke, and there was nothing revelatory about the dream. But I wondered why he should appear in my dream and why I remember his name and the topography of my neighborhood with such clarity and precision.
In the dream I recall our walking in Crotona Park—my local refuge and unprepossessing field of dreams. It’s a park I remember intimately—particularly the contours and look of the areas closest to my home. Not much else happened in the dream, so I will not mine it for its psychological significance.
I have a feeling that as I get older, I hold on to my boyhood memories more intensely. So those streets of tenements, art deco apartment houses, red-brick walk-ups, and private houses unfold in my mind’s eye as if they were before me today. I had a few close friends in the neighborhood growing up, but there were many other boys I played ball with and knew merely in passing. I knew them from playing softball in a playground league or playing a full-court basketball game in the school yard. But I can still conjure up many of their names even today. I recall their names with greater ease than I remember many classmates who went to graduate school with me.
I can see myself when I was 13 walking to a bakery and buying coffee cake or a baseball glove from the sports store, Dollinger’s. I can summon up exactly where they were located on the then-busy shopping street, Tremont Avenue. I know where every movie house was situated as well—the Fairmont, the Deluxe, the RKO Chester, and the Vogue—within a mile of my apartment. I do not want to romanticize the world I left behind so long ago (in fact, I was straining to leave it), and there was nothing idyllic about it. But it is indelible, so engrained in my consciousness, that I can invoke images of the past in a minute.
However, the past is gone, and whatever time that is left I am struggling to live as fully as possible. I hope I have a few good years left.
