Visiting Cole Street

Tripping down memory lane is somewhat of a double-edged sword at a certain age: they are a warm reconnection to times lovingly lodged in our hearts, but are also a cold reality check as welook back at the years stacking up like cord wood behind us while those ahead crackle like kindling on their hurried rush to ash.

Reunions tend to hammer that home. Here we are at an age you could scarcely have imagined being that day you got your diploma. That svelte image of you with a full head of hair was just you, not something to give you any pause. You looked in the mirror, and looking back was someone 17, young, forever, frozen in a time that despite its often crushing confusion, was where you’d always be.

But youth, as we come to realize, is perhaps the cruelest of life’s filters, clouding reality, year by year, decade by decade. That image in the mirror of a paunchy old bald man cannot be you, no matter how much your 17-year-old self still dwells within, stubbornly and blessedly impish and whimsical.

I graduated from Seekonk High School in 1971. I attended my five-year reunion (big mistake), then my 20th (huge success), and not again until this year, stepping back in time to my 51stt on a crisp September night at the Pawtucket Country Club.

It was, in a nutshell, one of the best nights of my life, due in a huge part to the work of our classmate organizers, Debbie Allenson Cylke, Maureen Murphy Rego, Barbara Boucher Passerello, and Marilyn Monroe Southam. (It is no coincidence the best organizers tend to be women.) Seeing old friends like them with whom you can just pick up and carry on, those five decades apart evaporating on a smile and a laugh, is the true gold in these golden years. Sitting in a room warm with memories is not a bad way to pass a chilly Friday night.

My buddies from our old days of sandlot ball on Cole Street in Seekonk were there, kids-now-old-men like Keith, Todd, Tommy, Dave, and so many more; those I played football with, hung out with, partied with, plotted lives after high school with, wondering what the years would hold and never imagining we’d live so many more of them because we, like most kids that age, were immortal.

Years weren’t a thing that would happen to us.

They did happen, of course. There was college or no college, marriage and kids, enduring devotion or divorce, careers you loved, careers you hated, there were deaths expected and deaths tragic, there was that often crushing confusion of life stretched far beyond our teenage years, with reunions giving us a wonderful place to share all that as well as our collective common memories of an innocent, sepiatoned time of our young lives we will cherish forever and foolishly thought would never end.

One of the best parts of a joyous evening: seeing a smattering of old teachers and guidance counselors, completely catching me by surprise because as I told a few of them who share my dark sense of humor, I honestly thought all my teachers were dead.

Happily, not all are, and here were people like Frank Mooney, legendary track coach who still coaches and whose name adorns the track at school, a history teacher who I told instilled in me an enduring love and respect for our past. There was Omer LeClerc, wise-ass teacher extraordinaire who unwittingly showed me the rewards of living a snarky life. There was James Kinder, a kinder teacher I’ve never met, patient to a fault with us in English classes. There was Nancy Dobie, no-nonsense but loving gym teacher. There were guidance counselors Bob Perreault and Ginny Gizzy, who worked in an office where my late mother was secretary for many years; they and the teachers told me what a beautiful soul she was.

And that was another edge to that sword I feared from attending my reunion: triggering memories of my mom, alive and loving, as well as my dad, my grandparents, relatives and friends from a long-gone era of my life, those times with them growing warmer with each passing year yet no less painful to recall. I feared that yawning ache and sure enough, it came.

And I welcomed it.

On the drive home late that night, I passed through the south end of Seekonk where I grew up, the route memorized and effortless from so many years on it, past my high school, down Arcade Avenue by the dormant overgrown Firefly Golf Course, through Luther’s Corner where I got my first haircut at Murgo’s and my first job at Kinnane’s Drug Store, and toward where a Howard Johnson’s once stood, under the orange roof of which I worked on and off for years.

And as I approached Cole Street, I instinctively flipped on my blinker, in that instant remembering home and wanting to turn and drive down that street, pull into the driveway, run inside that house, eat my mom’s leftovers and race up to bed across from the room my parents were sleeping in, waiting to protect me from being anywhere but there in the here and now and only the here and now, securely and forever young.

I could not do that of course. I flicked off the blinker and kept going, crying warm tears at the memory of all that and awash in the nostalgic glow of one remarkable evening with friends I love and will never forget.

One thing I know with rock-solid certainty after all these years: you can’t live in the past. But so much of it is sweet enough to make you want to visit as often as you need. And that works just fine for me.