End-of-Year Lookback Part One

If you could set aside the present long enough to look back for a while who would you recall? The ragtag army of kids swirling around in your street? That one you explored the receding North American forest with, looking for any kind of rock at all that looked even faintly like an arrowhead? What about the one who was bouncy and great to play with you just stopped noticing his runny nose and untied shoes?Maybe you see a small boy like the one I see from my first neighborhood where we were the only non-Jewish family on the block. He had dark brown eyes and black curly hair and I loved him in a mute third-grade way. Once I showed him the gorgeous white rosary beads I had scored for my First Communion and as some kind of perverse test asked him what he thought they were for. “For this,” he said and hung then around my neck and I thought my heart would melt.I see another boy shy and smart and forever indoors peeking at us from behind his bedroom curtains. Decades and decades later, after the fancy prep school and the boy-genius phase, he would come to imagine himself stalked and watched and get in fights with the cops and die way too young of nobody-really-knew-what.I think of the girl I met in line outside the lunchroom at our just-built elementary school who showed me a faint scar on her cheek which she said she got while being pulled from her mother’s body. I thought she was the most interesting person I had ever met and she became my friend for life then and there.We were all of us children together and united in powerlessness. We were fellow sufferers in music lessons and religious instruction, enduring regular visits from the family doctor who would sit on the edge of our beds tapping and prodding as we simmered with the fevers of a dozen childhood diseases....This is what I see of my earliest days when I closed my eyes and tried to look just now. What do you see when you do the same?