December 20, 2005
It is often around this time of year that I begin to reminisce about people that have come and gone. As I sit down to write out Christmas cards, the names and faces of those I've known dance around in my memory like children on a stage. After the years that have passed, I'm sure their features have become less well known next to the memories I keep. I imagine them all with hair that's longer or shorter, receding or colored in a different hue. I imagine them with the weight they've gained or the stubborn pounds that they've lost. I imagine them married, sitting in their living rooms and talking to their spouses about the two or three children they want to have... I imagine them in many different ways, these people who have faded from my direct acquaintance, but one scene that I picture them in is always the same; the fact that they haven't thought of me in days, months or years.The friends that I remember from those days back in my hometown. The people who helped to shape my life and the impact they have made. I only hope that they do not fade so very quickly so I might have the chance to recollect them all and keep them alive in my stories.
The girl whom my parents never really approved of as she had a tendency to drag me deep into her troubles. She was my first real friend and lived close enough to our house on the lake that we could peddle our bikes back and forth to visit. Her house in the subdivision always smelled like the burnt cheese from those microwaveable pizza squares that I dared not touch with a ten foot pole. Melinda lived with her father and step-mother for longer than her free will could handle. The only thing I can recall about her father is the way he would take the key out of his truck and clean out his right ear with it. The truck would run with or without the key -- most likely due to the massive amount of wax which lubed the inner workings of the ignition. I turned my head so they wouldn't notice the constant heaving of my chest on our way into town. I think I only threw up once.
She is my age and now lives in another town with a guy I've met maybe twice and her eight year old son who is in speech therapy. The last time I saw her, she had lost one of her front, upper teeth due to rotting. I asked her how she was doing but realized that I was so caught up with watching her nervously tongue the spot where she had lost the tooth. I had heard barely a word and yet I nodded with enthusiasm as she recalled the last few years of her life.
I received her Christmas card this year. She is the only person I know who still writes all their letters with a pink colored pen and uses circles to complete the letter 'i.' I remember this same hand writing from our days in Middle School and when we were together in High School detention; which was more often than we attended Spanish class in a year. I managed to graduate High School with my class by taking three of my Junior classes over during the summer before our senior year. She dropped out sometime before that in order to drink her days away with her mother. Between her and her sister, I believe they now have about five kids altogether. Melinda tells me that her sister goes about her days trying to figure out who the father is from the recent birth of a baby boy.
Her life sounds more like one of those surreal movies that one goes to watch on the big screen. It's okay as long as it's fictional and over in an hour and a half, but to actually live it seems impossible.
We used to hitchhike from our home town to other cities not more than an hour away. There was always someone that we knew somewhere -- a place for us to crash or a place for us to party well into the night. I think she liked having me along because I could steal whole cartons of cigarettes without ever getting caught. She had a propensity for getting caught for anything but she never seemed to mind that I would pretend not to know her if the cops were called into the picture. Since she was so young, they never took her to jail. They just called her father who either didn't answer the phone or told the cops to let her find her own way home. She would lie about her place of residence and we would meet up sometime later at a friend's or at my place; just to do it all again the next day.
Later, when she moved into her mother's trailer, I enjoyed visiting for days at a time. There was no sense of duty out there. You could do whatever the hell you wanted and it was almost required that you drink all day. They would get me high and drunk and I would wake up on the couch across the living room from her mother's monthly choice of men. I just got up and left one morning and, for a long time, didn't return her calls. It was not the life for me. At least, that extreme bit of drinking and drugs wasn't the life for me...
Melinda seems to be doing better now. She's been living with the father of her child for quite some time now and has returned to school (at least three times) in order to get her GED. Every once in awhile, I get that same old tickle, just about this time of year and dig through years of Christmas cards looking for her number. We talk like we've been strangers for ten the years that we have been strangers. The only thing we have in common now are our memories of delinquency and doubt and the fact that we faced these troubles together. We're not written on the same page nor have we since I've known her. We were always different and I always knew it. Still, I get to missing her sometimes. The innocence of her words, misspelled and written in pink, never fail to bring me back, And that's about when I remember that some memories are more sweet in their backward glances.
Despite the distance, we are better friends and, it's just good to know that she's still out there.
Far away but out there just the same.
Merry Christmas, Melinda.