My Friend (At 8)

I still can't get my head out of my memories.  Touching my 10 year old friend when I was 8, my father catching us, searching for her in her abandoned house and finding her mother instead and touching her mother instead, touching her on that rickety kitchen table from that Van Gogh painting.  There is only the table in the crumbling house.  The table and me and her mother.  And then my lost albino hamster crawling out from beneath the broken floorboards.  Me, crawling from beneath the limp body of her mother, feeling the table creak and tremble, and rushing to save my hamster.  To me, at 8, my hamster was important.

It seems I don't conjure up emotions to go with my memories, or I mean I don't remember the emotions I had at the time. I have many emotions when I remember the past, but I'm not sure they're appropriate.  I would have to actually be there to know the same emotion as then.

That would have been 1956, when I was 8.  My world was huge at that time. The gigantic lot our house was on.  It took ages just to walk around the block.  I could spend years exploring the town on my bicycle.  It must have taken days for my hamster to walk next door and get lost.  She was so small.

When I came back years later, our house had burned down.  The lot was small, barely large enough to hold the box-elder tree and the walnut tree where I built tree-houses.  The huge catalpa tree I had planned to climb to reach the stars was still growing.  I imagined a little depression in the ground where I dug to China.

The house next door where my fist girlfriend and her mother lived, had fallen in upon itself.  I imagined the kitchen table under the rubble.  To my surprise the house was actually so close that my hamster could have gotten there easily, quickly.  More memories of girls and friends and family.  Young love.  Young sex.  Nostalgic manipulation.  Nostalgia is past tense and intensely malleable.  As far as I'm concerned it still is.