Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Prompt Entry #6

Time is a bridge between memories. One day you are walking to a store angry that your mother wanted Diet Pepsi and sent you on the errand. The next – though hardly the next because some 10,950 days have elapsed – you are a dad walking to the same store with your son to buy yet another Diet Pepsi so you can play with the silly stocking stuffer he gave you at Christmas. And in a single moment you realize that the passage of time is about letting go and a little bit of healing.

There is a slight track of land in our neighborhood that reminds me of everything I despised and worried about as a child. The street I walked then and now is called Prospect, a road that fronts the parking lot to a 7-11 convenience store. The lot and the road merge at a sloping angle through a tiny yard. For years it had been common for kids to cut the corner and make our own footpath along a beaten trail up the slope and into the parking lot. We didn't have the patience (or respect) to walk to the concrete and take a right angle as drivers do. The path urged into existence by short-cut teens was no more than fifty feet long and all of three feet wide, but it was trampled down to a dirt path like you might see on a hiking trail. It was a well-trodden path. It is now only a trace of its former self. The ridge is there but grass has grown in; it looks like a scar healed over.

The gift my son gave me is a tube designed to make a geyser from Mentos candy when dropped in diet soda. You attach the tube to a full bottle of pop laced with phenylalanine, drop the chewy treats down the tube, release the safety string so the candies plummet into the soda, and then watch a geyser of foam explode through the opening. It actually works! After a few seconds, the brown froth rises and erupts through the tube to shoot a sprout into the air almost two feet high. It is a complete waste of terrible soda and good candy, but the smile on Brian’s face is worth the three dollars we spent. Cost is nothing compared to a Christmas promise fulfilled. I had told him we would test the toy come spring time.

Years ago, I felt pressure boiling under my tension as I walked to the store, angry and still very confused about why my parents had divorced. I hadn't learned yet how to place blame or come to terms with problems of the adult world. When my mom asked me to walk to 7-11 to buy her a two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi, I went but I was furious. I huffed and steamed the whole way there, grunting underbreath for the equivalent of four city blocks. The errand, it seemed to me, was no different than fetching my father's beer, the same cans of alcohol I was told had ruined my family.

I eventually moved away and then a decade later returned to that same neighborhood as an adult – long story short, that sort of thing – in order to raise my own family. I live two streets from where I spent my formative years and the 7-11 is still there. It has changed as has the neighborhood, but only in terms of who works there and who lives where, and the absence of busses that used to slide through the streets all day and all night.

I had first moved into the neighborhood as a ten-year-old boy; a striking irony now that Brian is also ten. As Brian and I walked to the store on a recent spring evening warm enough to make me wish I had worn shorts, I remembered that log-ago Diet Pepsi and realized how easy my life has been. I never witnessed a drive-by shooting, nor the atrocities that people from other countries have suffered. The scars of social and political injustice mark my neighbors as much as my emotional wounds have healed. After all, it was just a soft drink my mom wanted. But people have fled Burma and Serbia and Yugoslavia and Bosnia to find a better life, here, in a place I have long called home. The houses remain, though the addresses receive mail of different last names, some I cannot pronounce.

Where my friends and I used to traipse toward the store and stomp the land into a finely packed trail there now grows rejuvenated grass. It is as if scars from our minor disrespect have grown over with the fresh seeds of better-mannered kids. Or, do kids even walk to the store anymore? We ran up that slope in races! We shot our bikes toward the hill with no effort – we were ten, fifteen, and soon we drove there anyway. Maybe today's kids get dropped off to get their moms' Diet Pepsi. "Be back in an hour," a parent waves as they retreat in the family SUV or minivan. This generation is being raised by new absenteeism. Not my kids.

Our walk that evening was simple, the time-honored truth of quality over quantity. Brian asked about pirates of the high seas and whether a stick he had found could defend him against a swashbuckler with a sword. He wondered whether The Hulk could lift that car, that car, that one? “What about that truck?” he asked as we avoided the trail to enter the store. He proposed that maybe I was stronger than Hulk. It depends, but it’s doubtful, I thought. Can the Hulk heal scars as they grow invisible year after year?