Cracked Window

They say that after death people live on in others’ dreams. But I rarely dream about my mother, dead for five years. I much prefer how she materialized last month at my forty-year high school reunion in Winter Park, Florida.

Several friends told me how much they liked my mother. Who could blame them? She swore a lot, was intensely curious about their love lives, and freely dispensed advice on how to attract girls. By the time we were seniors, she let us throw back a beer or two. Better than driving around town and drinking, she’d say.

I’ve made it halfway through a movie that uses my childhood home on a Central Florida lake as a main setting. One of my brother’s bought the DVD after I learned of the film and wrote about it.

So far it’s like glancing around a museum I visited a long time ago, a familiar building containing exhibits I don’t recognize. I choked up a bit at the first glimpse of the living room, a room I haven’t seen since 1970, the year my family moved out while I was away at college. But my notion that I’d be sent hurtling back and experience wave after wave of bittersweet nostalgia isn’t materializing.

I have a high school friend named Jim. I haven’t seen him in nearly four decades. In fact, none of our other friends have seen him in years. This protracted absence gives Jim a leg up on the rest of us: he’s frozen in our minds as he was back then, young and good-natured and athletic.

People have a way of drifting off after high school and college, not by design, but more like dandelion seeds on a puff of wind. We end up where we do, looking forward and not back. At least until the weight of so many passing years reverses everything, and we try to put the flower back together.

In late August I was three thousand miles from my Portland home, back in the Orlando area where I grew up, left, and returned to work for seventeen years.

My wife and I were enjoying a notable meal at a new restaurant in Winter Park, The Ravenous Pig. I heard a familiar voice at a nearby table but didn’t turn around. Suzame confirmed it was a personable guy I fired years ago from the newspaper, the Orlando Sentinel.

Dawn has passed without sleep, and I’m headed back to Portland, crammed into a jetliner thigh-to-thigh with strangers. But I’m elsewhere, drifting through another world, a planet of the previous three days and nights in Central Florida.

With me in this world are dearest friends, friends I’d lost for an unspeakable number of years. The occasion, at least on the surface, is my forty-year high school reunion, which conjures up a stereotypical image of social gatherings not conducive to meaningful conversations.

In the examining room, I waited for the dermatologist. Framed on the wall was an information sheet about melanoma.

The doctor entered. Tall, thin, and past retirement age, he shook my hand as one would expect an ex-Marine to shake it.

It took more than a half-century, but I finally learned why we ended up living on a lake in Central Florida during my childhood. Not one house but three as we moved clockwise around Lake Sybelia in Maitland from the late 1950s to 1970.