The Beatles sang of "places I'll remember all my lifetime..." and that holds true for most of us. What about people? People you remember, though you did not know them well. People who have been living in the back roads of your brain that somehow hung around for decades.
In a way, we all collect people. Some are friends. Some were friends, however briefly. The other day, I read on a Facebook page for members who attended the high school I went to that a woman from my graduation year had passed on. The name stuck in my mind blinking as familiar. Within seconds a picture appeared of a teenager with braces on her teeth. Where had this been for the last 5 decades?
In thinking about my last two years of college I recalled a half dozen people I called friends but I never saw again since I once roamed the UCLA campus in the late 1960s.
There was Susie, a rather youthful Raggedy Annie, with curly auburn hair and a smattering of freckles. We never "dated" per see, but rather hung out and had some other friends in common. Like some of my college friends, she lived in an affluent part of West LA. I commuted from a working-class section of the Valley. Susie once asked me to pay her a visit while she was house-sitting for some friends of her family. Once locating the mansion-like home I hung out for a couple of hours. All I remember is going into a bathroom with gold mirrors and carpet on the floor. I had never seen a bathroom with carpeting and kept wondering why would anyone do that? Because they can is all I could figure out. I'd love to see Sue again, but I barely remember her name. Those auburn curls must be white by now.
I played harmonica in the sculpture garden with a cat named Erik. His father was a big movie director and he too came from money. Erik was active in the school's drug culture, always had plenty of money, and played a good blues harp. That was our bond. Erik was impish in every way, from his elfin appearance to the bib overalls he wore every day. I searched his name once and found a gray-bearded environmentalist, stout and wealthy and that could be him. No sign of blues music anywhere.
And then there was Marv. By now he could be Marvin. A true brother because we both filed for our CO status at the same time. Marv was a gentle soul. Well-read, he and I had difficult conversations about dealing with the draft during the Vietnam war days. We never kept in touch and the years just piled up before I made any attempt to track him down.
There were two guys in my ethnic studies classes that were most memorable. David was going to be a Baptist minister after his undergraduate work. An African-American with Southern roots he attended the first Black history classes at the university with me. His friend Gerald was often with him and so I befriended him too. Gerald was a Latino grad student. We extended class discussions to our lunch breaks, and slowly became close friends. I remember when Gerald told me that his chances of marrying a Latina were slim. Why? I innocently asked. Because there are very few college-educated Latina women in my world and I'm probably going to have a career in academia. I was silently shocked, but in retrospect, I think I finally got what he was saying.
Steve was a guitar player that greeted me with a 10 bar blues progression on occasion. We'd sit under a tree in the sculpture garden and play some blues. I learned about playing "cross harp" with him and always made sure to have a C, G, A, and F harp with me. Steve, like me, was on a tight budget. He was a working-class kid who got into the university on his grades. Originally from the midwest, he wore a wrinkled white tee-shirt and faded jeans every day. He lived on bologna sandwiches on Wonder Bread.
There were a few more who will no doubt visit me the next time I find a quiet moment of reflection. I have no expectations here. If I ever located one of these folks, I wouldn't be surprised if they had no memory of our time together. That happens more often than not.
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