The Old Neighborhood

The night before last I went to the wake of the lady I lived next door to growing up, who I still picture barefoot in bermudas, smiling as we tore in and out of her house all day, a pack of drool-flinging dogs hot on our heels.When I first got there I felt both weary and strangely shy. “I’ll stay just 30 minutes, then get back and start dinner,” I told myself. I signed the guest book and prayed at the kneeler where her urn was displayed next to a half-completed crossword, her eyeglasses set down beside it as if she had just jumped up for a minute to see to some small task.I spoke first with Mr. Wilson and then their three great kids, companions of my happy childhood. Then my middle school boyfriend appeared and I talked to him a while before confessing that I was making my way doorward. “I’m just so tired, I don’t even think I can make the rounds again to say goodbye. With all these people here and the family so busy I could just sneak out, couldn’t I?“You could, sure you could,” he said mildly. “But think for a minute how you'll feel when you make that first left hand turn out of the parking lot?”He was right. This wake was not arranged as an Rx for me. I took off my coat and stayed another hour.I spoke again with Mr. Wilson, then with the O'Heirs from the old farmhouse down the road; then the two brothers on the other side of our house who my sister Nan and I were off-and-on in love with only for about ten yeas between us. Then in came Mrs. Blazon from two doors down, at 82 still the blue-eyed beauty whose little sons I babysat in high school.The older one stood beside her now and I went right over.“Hey, Mrs. Blazon! And you’re Billy, right?“Well, Bill, yes.”“Your mom let my friend Tina and me take you for a little walk in your stroller when you were like ten months old. We made straight for the woods by the Pow-Wow Oak and immediately got your booties soaking wet, which forced us to sneak back home, steal matches from my kitchens, go back to the woods and make a fire to dry you out."“Yes and I haven’t walked right since,” said Bill, though of course he doesn’t remember. I'm amazed I remembered, since Tina and I were only nine, maybe ten at the time. If Mrs. Blazon wondered about the dark smudges on her woodsmoke-reeking child she never said so, though I do now recall that I wasn’t asked to babysit again until I was an all-too-serious senior in high school translating Latin orations after Billy and his little brother had tumbled about like pups in their PJs, then tucked into bed like a couple of angels.All this came back to me at this wake that I am so glad I went to and stayed long at. Because now they are fully alive in my mind, Barbara and Charlie Wilson, the departed one so calm and quick to laugh always, and also the one remaining, funny salty-tongued Mr. Wilson who so many times all but physically tossed eight or ten of us in the back of his convertible and brought us for ice cream, he leaning out the window to loudly moo at the cows we passed in that one field along the way.