Memories and time: is this relativity?
Oct 14, 05:37 PM by Darryl Crum
Somewhere, somehow, at a time when I was not focused, at a time when I was too busy thinking about the problems of the present and too busy hoping for a better future, I laid the memories of my childhood down and walked away from them, not even aware I had lost them. It wasn’t so much that I had lost them as it was that I had abandoned them for what they represented, abandoned them because I didn’t value them.
I found some of them recently, scattered over the earlier tracks of my life – some here, some there, but I believe the most important memories of my childhood may have been the ones I found along Highway 75, on a small piece of concrete that had once been the foundation of Fortune Baptist Church.
This church is my foundation. It is where the cornerstones of my character were laid, the place where the foundation and structure of my character were built, shaped by the mindful hands of family, friends, and neighbors, by church people, ministers, farmers and farmers’ wives, by people who worshipped at Fortune Baptist Church, a place where reality battled hope every Sunday and hope always won.
These memories of mine weren’t just laying about, like a set of misplaced keys, or glasses mindlessly left on a book shelf, waiting for me to walk upon them and whisper a sigh of relief. These memories were scattered, and abandoned and yearning to be found. And like so many sheep scattered and lost, they could only be found and brought together through the effort of their thoughtless sheppard.
Parkin
I found the first memory of my childhood as I drove west on Highway 64 and entered the residue of my hometown, Parkin, Arkansas. It is my hometown, but it is not where I lived, that was well out in the country along the river, amid the endless acres of cotton fields. Parkin was where we went when we needed more than we could find at the small dry good stores near where we lived.
Parkin was small! Funny thing is in my memories it wasn’t small at all, but now that I know what small is, reality overrides memories and I’m pretty certain, Parkin was small. But when I was a child. . . boy, when I was a child, when I was four or five it was more than I could even imagine, more than I could take in.
I remember it. Parkin was electricity in the air. It was noise and cars and laughter – families on the sidewalks, busy sidewalks, busy stores, busy streets – women in their best dresses, men wearing clean but worn and patched overalls. It was a human beehive. It had ‘buzz’! If it was Saturday, it was alive just like the beehives my Grandpa, and Uncle Jake and my brother Bobby keep.
It was where the wealthier farmers, the sharecroppers, the day workers, the loggers, the mule farmers, and railway workers came to buy school clothes for their children, came to see a movie, came to drink a soda at the local drug store, or came to drink whiskey in the back of one of the two barber shops. These were the worker bees returning to the hive, creating the buzz.
The Once and Future Hostess Cupcake
