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I am quick to say we romanticize more about things as time continues to pass longer after these things happen. Whether it’s an event, an old town or neighborhood, memories with friends, and favorite sports moments.
Are they as wonderful as we recall them? Many times, they’re not.
They can be, however, interesting based on the narrator’s ability to discuss them more vividly, or the ability to remember things about the past that color, but do not exaggerate = the story.
Thursday evening, I was telling a mixologist, in the company of my wife, about my experiences in the Old Brooklyn neighborhood in Cleveland’s West side.
My wife chimed in, “The last time I went with him to West Side Market we detoured to that neighborhood, and I had no idea what he was seeing or thinking as he said, ‘this IS such a great neighborhood.’ He didn’t see what I saw. He had, like, his 1970s goggles on.”
Old Brooklyn has some nicer homes in its uphill area, but I realized parts of the neighborhood were not what they used to be, especially as you headed downhill on Broadview Road toward what used to be a Red Barn restaurant (look up the story of this chain restaurant, and see some of their anthropomorphic pieces of food singing it’s tag line).
The place is still shaped like a barn, but it’s brown and no one born after 1985 would even know it was a restaurant.
It was a fond memory because my savvy cousins knew, as the evening business was closing, the milkshake machines were getting emptied. It would already be dark, and we were kids, but we never thought anything of it when we’d make sure we looked as… unpretentious… as we could look to get free milkshakes when they’d give us a look near closing time.
My cousins were more middle class than my immediate family was, but they had resourceful, frugal contexts because my aunt and uncle earned good money, but they were big time savers. They would bring home unused ketchup packets from dining, too, for example.
This segued into recalling my sadness because we could not afford to replace my stolen bike. My cousin, Lisa, took me around different parts of Old Brooklyn two nights in a row to do some garbage picking. She told me if we went up and down every street, we’d find a bike I could use.
We did!
So here I was in my normal, PA announcer voice volume saying in a bar, “She taught me how and when to go garbage picking!”
My wife quickly replied, “Shhhhhh!” because she was embarrassed while we talked about it in an uncrowded setting. This was, however, when the person we were talking to noted, “That’s a core memory. It’s not embarrassing. You just associate it with a fun time you recalled.”
He was right.
I must be careful. Things like this do not embarrass me because it was a different era, and I am who I am today. I’ve seen siblings cringe when I tell outsiders things like this:
My dad, aged 15 and born in a house in Crandall, Georgia, fudged his birthdate in his family Bible and proceeded to take it down to get a birth certificate he’d need to have to migrate to Cleveland, Ohio with his older brother. His birth year was conveniently 1939 instead of 1940, so he was able to seek work in 1955 because he was NOW 16 years old.
My dad stopped going to school after completing fifth grade but managed to find his niche running printing presses. He was a night shift foreman (with about 4 ½ years on days) as far back as I can remember until 1986.
He was who he was in whatever moment in whatever room he was in. Talk about beating the odds.
I’m who you see in front of you, but not as reinvented as my dad was. I have turned many lemons in my life into lemonade, and I like to tell those stories now because it reminds me, especially on a frustrating day, that life turned out rather good.
I remember a Facebook post I made several years ago – one in my usual self-deprecating style – about my “medium talent” when it came to sports in general. Surprisingly, an old schoolmate replied, “…you could run like the wind.”
That felt good, and I have always been so quirky that I assumed no one noticed much of what I did well.
It just seems easier, and a lot of fun, to talk about things that didn’t go well because you can write or tell it more colorfully than a Hollywood plot experience.
This morning while you’re reading this, I am going to speak to someone who will tell me about their initial efforts in a very challenging turnaround mission, and I am excited to see if they can colorfully reflect on some of the wins and some of the ongoing challenges.
I like it when people let their hair down. It’s so opposite of most social media posts, and I genuinely believe some of a person’s best work starts when they are handed chicken excrement hell bent on turning it into chicken salad.
