Recalling the Past Over Chicken and Dumplings and Sweet Tea

As planned, I met Neal Ellis at a Cracker Barrel restaurant off the interstate near Birmingham. Neal has been a friend of the family for many years, for almost as many years as I have been on this earth. We moved into the Fairview section of Birmingham when I was 2 years old and he was (I am guessing here) in his teens. We lived on the same street. We attended the same church. His parents and my parents were good friends. My parents maintained the friendship, especially with Neal, even after we had moved away from Birmingham. While I was just a little girl growing up to be a bigger little girl (we moved from Birmingham when I was 7), Neal was a young man making the transition from being a youth into being a young man going off to college.

The years passed. Life careers began and ended. Children were born. Parents died. Marriages began and ended. In short, life moved on, but even though we had not seen each other in many years, we kept alive the tradition of sending Christmas cards and what news was fit to share. To my knowledge, he is one of the only two people on earth who are still aliving and who were friends of my parents. I will see the other person when I turn up in the Raleigh area and visit Virginia Green, who lives in an assisted living facility there near my sister.

During our conversation over lunch, Neal and I got around to discussing Birmingham and all the changes that have taken place in the city since I lived there. In short... many years, many changes. It is a different city from the one I remember.

I told him how I recall having such a great childhood there and remember running footloose all over the neighborhood. I recalled my blue and white Schwinn bicycle (a present from my grandparents) and riding that bicycle seemingly anywhere I wanted. And there were my Union clamp-on skates and endless sidewalks and streets for skating...my skate key on a shoestring and carried around my neck. The street games lasted well into a summer evening...'kick the can," "red rover," hide-and-go-seek," jump rope and hopscotch...we recalled the local monument works where my father would periodically take me for the selection of a scrap piece of highly polished marble or granite. They were the best sliding stones for a competitive game of hopscotch. And there was the best birthday present ever on the occasion of my 5th birthday...a yellow tent, not just an ordinary tent....a wigwam!

We recalled the ice cream vendor who would show up on a hot summer afternoon with his horse-drawn ice cream cart (dry ice is the answer to your question as to how the banana popsicles stayed frozen) and Tony, the vegetable man also coming through the neighborhood with his horse drawn cart calling out, "A-fresha vegetables! Fresh-a spinach! Fresh-a carrots! Fresh-a too-mott-oes!" And always we tried to be curbside when Mr. Attaway came by with his ice truck. He would whip out his ice pick and shave off a sliver of ice that, for whatever reason, seemed especially good.

And then Neal began to tell me about the neighborhood as it is today...describing houses abandoned and boarded up, of houses that had burned and the ruins are still in place, of the airplane that had crashed into two of the houses and the remains still there. The sidewalks are broken and heaved up. Junked cars sit in the street. The elementary school (Imperial Palace to my first and second grade teachers...Mrs. Clyatt and Miss Champion) has been torn down. Sparks Store, where I was sent for a loaf of bread or a can of pineapple, is long gone.

It was strange that all of what either of us remembered from those heady days of youth has vanished. All that is left, really, are some fading black and white photographs, retrievable from various shoe boxes, but long forgotten. And there is this tenuous human connection that has somehow survived all the years that have served to obliterate the rest of what constitutes the substance of our combined memories.

But one other thing remains...the Kodak 616 camera my father used to take the picture of me standing in front of my yellow wigwam...the camera I stood grinning into on that July day so long ago is on my book shelf.