Unfrozen

        For the past year I've been driving through south Toledo nearly every morning on my way to Perrysburg.  I pass the shopping center where Mr. Kregel, Bowsher High School's football coach, taught me to drive.  The place that used to be the Glenbyrne Theater where I watched Star Wars eleven times with my little sister.  The vacant lot where Byrnedale Junior High once stood, the building where my seventh grade language arts teacher, Miss Kurtz, taught me to love writing.  I drive by the convenience story that was once a 7-Eleven that provided eggs and milk and bread during the blizzard of 1978 (I still can't believe my mom let me pull a sled all by myself through the intersection of Eastgate and Glendale to get provisions for the family).  Right before I reach Front Street, I pass by the Rec Center where I swam in the summer and visited Children's Wonderland each Christmas. 

         Every morning I'm blocks away from the house I grew up in on Eastwick Drive and pass by landmarks of my childhood that bring back a treasure trove of memories:  six-year-old Katie enjoying a peach flavored ice cream cone at the UDF that was scooped by Mrs. Heumann, my next door neighbor.          Seven-year-old Katie playing softball in the Glendale Elementary backfield being yelled at by the coach for not getting in the game.  

        Ten-year-old Katie tooling around Southwyck Mall with my sisters, exploring Walden Books, Coach House Gifts and Old Towne.  

        Thirteen-year-old Katie singing a solo in the junior high school play "Wheels".  

        Seventeen-year-old Katie driving to school her senior year, grateful to escape taking the Tarta bus and the teenage boys who pinched and mocked her body.  

        Twenty-one-year-old Katie helping pack up the Eastwick house when her parents moved away.

       At first, all of those moments seemed frozen in time as if I was a different person who lived through the 70's and 80's in a middle class house on a middle class street in a middle class neighborhood.  Who I am now at fifty-five is a far cry from the kid who loved hearing the church bells ring through the field behind our street, telling me it was time to come home for dinner.  Still, over the past twelve months I've had the opportunity to drive day after day after day past places that are now vastly different than they used to be.

       Our world is now unlike anything we've ever experienced -- even more so since the pandemic started.  Yet long before the lockdowns and testing and divisions over what is best for the common good, there's been a crumbling of common ground.  Our culture has a long history, but a short memory, and so it seems do most people.

       It's been a unique blessing to have the opportunity to gently revisit my past in the early morning hours as darkness slowly turns to light.  Over the weeks and months, I've slowly realized that all the Katies of the past are still within me, the memories even easier to access since they've been unfrozen from the silent places inside.

        Seemingly insignificant moments come back like reading a book while waiting at the bus stop by Rudy's Hot Dog.  Other more dramatic ones resurface, too, like the time my mother walked away from the house when my sisters and I were fighting and I was scared she'd never come back.  She did an hour or so later, telling us she was at the same Rudy's having a cup of coffee to take a break from all the noise.  It used to be that I couldn't pass a Rudy's without bitterly thinking about my mom's escape, that moment lodged in my mind like an iceberg.  But now after driving by the restaurant a hundred times, it's become a neutral place as the memories have melted into a new awareness of why she left and why she came back.

        After all this time I can look back on my long history and find a common ground in everything I've remembered.  Even though I'm not the same person I was as a kid, in my teens, twenties and beyond, in many ways I've been able to see how seamlessly my past set the stage for what was to come.  Everything I experienced as a child informed who I became as an adult.

        For a long time I used to lock my memories away, compartmentalizing them in journals, thinking about them as if they happened to another person, someone I had long buried in the past.  Now as winter is slowly turning to spring, they've magically melted into the present during my morning drive.  In an instant I can recall the taste of a soft-serve cone with chocolate shot from Penguin Palace.  I can smell the corn and burgers roasting on a grill at the annual summer block party.  I can hear the echoing laughter of children playing Kick the Can and Red Light, Green Light.  As I drive by Rudy's Hot Dog, I can see in my mind's eye Glendale Elementary School that used to stand across the street, the place where Jimmy Marsh kissed me on the cheek in second grade. 

        I've never longed to go back in time, to stay eternally twenty-nine.  I've yearned to be separate from the past, to pretend events never happened, to forget moments in time that were filled with fear, embarrassment, and shame.  How fascinating that a daily drive through the south end of town has given me the time to remember in the safe space of solitude.  It's a meditation to allow those memories to melt, then float downstream into the ocean of the present moment, knowing every experience is a part of who I am now.

        

First grade school picture from Glendale Elementary, 1972