POLING: Forgotten on a familiar street
Laughter above a mingle of voices. Silhouettes against a porch-light night.
The combination attracts my attention across the street. I travel 30 years back in time.
The laugh could be the sparkling cackle of an old friend. The woman who once lived in this house.
The murmur of voices could be the conversations of old friends. We often gathered on this same porch, likely resembling these same silhouettes to a time-traveling observer three decades gone.
Is it the darkness of night or the fade of my aging eyes, but could that possibly be my own silhouette viewed on that familiar porch?
Hard to tell how many times I’ve walked this route during the past several years.
Occasionally, I make a mental note that the house on the corner was once the home of an old friend and colleague. A place where many of us gathered after work or after the clubs closed or on a rainy Saturday or Sunday afternoon for movies or a game on TV, or to just gab as we crowded onto that old porch.
In recent years, the memories return with less frequency. Twenty years ago, the house’s memories came immediately. Just the sight of the place evoked the past.
Yet, given enough time, revisiting the same place for a different purpose, the recent past replaces the distant past. What was once an every time conscious realization of parking near a personally important place becomes the rare recognition of having once known people in the house on the corner.
The place’s new familiarity becomes so mundane as a backdrop to the present that it bears no relation to its former esteem in the glory of one’s past.
Until this night, the voices, the laughter, the silhouettes of people whose ages now are about the same as our ages then, I can’t help feeling like a backwards Rip Van Winkle, a man who realizes he’s been transported 30 years into the past. Or perhaps, a man haunted by ghosts.
Where are all of those people who once gathered on this porch? Some have died. Some have lost their way. Some have vanished. Some have been lost to the inconvenience of new lives lived, of good intentions lost to changing realities. Some settled down, married, with children. Some have found new loves since then. Some still wander the night.
People who were once as vital as that house who have moved to other places, other dimensions and other lives. Those people and places that move through one’s life like silhouettes on a cool fall evening. Those who haven’t been seen for decades but are as close as laughter on a familiar porch.
Ghosts accompany me this evening on my walk.
Yet, with so many of those old friends having moved away or moved on, I can’t shake the feeling that I am the ghost, haunting a neighborhood that I have known well but one that no longer knows me.
Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and editor of The Tifton Gazette.
