Reunion

I've always been a glutton for punishment
when it comes to revisiting the past.
And I've had my emotional hand
(sometimes even cheek)
slapped for it
and still persisted.

I never realized until tonight how revisiting places from your past
(let alone people)
conjures up some bizarre thoughts.

A friend from elementary school's --
one of the few I had also with a single mother --
mother died last year.
When I passed her house the woman who bought it after her death was weeding the flower bed in the front.
I wondered if she knew how Sam probably hates that she lives there,
because she only lives there because Sam's mom died and Sam lives in Boston.
I know I would hate that woman weeding, if I were Sam.
Just a little.

Driving through the "bad" (read: slightly less affluent than the rest) part of town, I saw a grandmother pushing a baby in a stroller made for a doll, towards her mother who was sitting on a porch across the street with a beer in her hand, laughing and joking with her similarly-aged friends
as their similarly-aged offspring sat on their laps, toddled around the driveways,
or were pushed in doll strollers
nearby.
I remembered when that grandmother was "So-and-So's Mom" at Girl Scout meetings.
So-and-So's daughter, in the stroller, looked just like her.
My mother is still just "Katie's Mom" and it makes me feel old and scared to think she could easily be "So-and-So's Grandma."

I drove tonight to my old high school the same path I took for four years.
Highway, mostly,
then turn off into a housing development that connected along the side of the school
by a quad of tennis courts.

Tonight, it looked like that.

(I must have been breaking the law for years without the slightest idea. I wonder what was so delinquent, so scandalous, about that stretch of concrete. Must have been in one of Jesus's blind spots.)


My mother's neighbor is still an asshole
who yells obscenities at his wife
on their perfectly manicured lawn, in front of their McMansion.
The only thing that's changed
is that he is now also an asshole to his children
on the front lawn.
Tonight his son, who I last saw as a four-year-old,
jumped on his bike and tore down the block
with such determination and ferocity and anger that the bike wheels spat gravel backwards
at the Asshole as he screamed at his fleeing form.
It made me wonder
what it feels like to never want to go home again.