Remembered Moments ....

I had an email exchange with a business associate who is becoming more of a friend; quirky sense of humor, wicked good taste in food, and he has a Golden. All in all, I figure he's a good guy. I had closed out my email to him with a movie quote, and when I stopped in the office this fine Saturday morning for some files, I checked my work email and discovered he'd answered me. His comment? 'Great movie....' Yeah, well, more than twenty minutes had passed since I'd sent him that email, so I had NO clue as to what he was referring. I scrolled down in the exchange, and saw the following quote:

'You're killin' me, Smalls!'

Now, for those of you who know this movie, you know it's probably one of the top three 'coming of age' movies out there, ranking right up with 'Stand By Me' and 'The Christmas Story'. Fabulous film of a young pre-teen boy coming into his own, making friends, learning about life. For those of you not familiar with the movie 'Sandlot', Smalls is the last name of the newbie on the block, trying desperately to make friends in the summertime. Remember summertime? When you played with your buds from school, and didn't bother with anyone you didn't know, except to mock and belittle? Yes, well, that's the world he walked into. The 'sandlot kids' take him under their wing, a group of misfits who live for one thing - baseball. Hanging out in the treehouse one particular night, one of the boys says to Smalls: 'want a smore?' to which Smalls replies, 'more what?', and the boy says ' a smore!' in a tone implying idiot. Confused, Smalls looks at the boy and, with great dignity (remember, still a newbie), says, 'how can I have more, if I haven't had any?' The boy looks at him, shakes his head, and says, 'You're killin' me, Smalls.'

And when my buddy replied that it was a great movie, I got to thinking about growing up, the things we did to entertain ourselves. If we wanted s'mores, we couldn't go to the cookie aisle in the grocery store. No, we had to go to the cracker aisle, buy the graham crackers, hunt down the 'mallow (marshmallows), buy the Hershey's Chocolate bar (and you know only Hershey would do), and then we had to convince someone, one of the big people, to let us build a fire out by the creek, or better yet, convince our parents to take us camping. Only then, after we'd been eaten alive by bugs, fallen out of trees, nearly drowned one another in our swimming in the creek excursions - only then, under the night sky brilliant with moon and stars, firelight dancing high into the night, and only then, could we enjoy a s'more. Half the enjoyment - okay, most of the enjoyment - was in the anticipation of the treat. Piece by piece, it had to be built, created from nothing. The buy-in of the big people was the beginning .... the night ending with sticky fingers, chocolate around the mouth, graham cracker crumbs dotting the sleeping bags, and dogs licking any small hand they could find .... that was the final payoff.

That got me to thinking about all the other things we did, without safety nets, without the consumer republic there to help us satisfy our every whim and urge. Swimming downstream in the creek one summer, in a still wading pool, coming out to find our feet still black with sand. Okay, we'll go rinse them off again. Still black. The still wading pool was a breeding ground for leeches. I'm not sure which of us screamed louder, me, my two little sisters, or my brother. Literally, our feet were black. We stayed upstream, in the current, after that. Diving off a tree limb into the creek, learning quickly that you must dive shallow, or risk a severe head injury. Riding on the bar of a bicycle, to get thrown off, smash your head into the ground hard enough to have pebbles picked out of your ear for over an hour by the family physician. Halloween, when it was safe to eat the candy. There was a woman who went all out, every year, for the kids. She opened her home, dressed as a witch, and would bring us in in groups to bob for apples and be generally terrorized. Man, we looked forward to that night from the moment school started up in September.

Summers we would spend with my grandparents, still living in the house my mother finished her growing up years, in the Pittsburgh, PA area. And the first thing my father would do, once we crossed into Pennsylvania, was to stop at a corner grocery and send one of the kids in for Krispy Klondikes. Best ice cream on the planet, or so we believed as kids. You could only buy Krispy Klondikes in Pennsylvania. We didn't have a drivers' license. So, rather like the s'mores, the anticipation of this treat began the moment our parents told us the dates of our summer with Grandma. Was it the best ice cream on the planet? Probably not - although it is pretty darn good. It was the anticipation of an infrequent treat that jacked this really good ice cream up into the stratosphere. I was living in Houston, married but no daughter yet, when I stopped in the middle of the frozen food section, staring in disbelief, then gaping in astonishment, then grinning with joy. There, in the middle of the frozen food section, was the best ice cream on the planet - yep, Krispy Klondikes! I bought the six-pack, took it home, gave one to my husband and said, 'You've got to try this!', all the while unwrapping my own. After devouring the square of vanilla ice-cream covered with rich chocolate with rice krispies embedded in it, I called home to Cleveland Ohio. My dad answered the phone, and I just burst out: 'Dad, Dad, I had a Krispy Klondike!' to which my father replied, 'That's nice, honey. Did you want to talk with your mother?' and just like that, I was ten again, and we were driving down Central, Pittsburgh's answer to Lombard Street in San Francisco, Dad's big Cadillac slamming down in the dips, flying up into never-never land with each rising hill.

All these memories, triggered by food. It's never the food - it's the day, the moment, the life wrapped around that food. Making s'mores during our winter picnic, my mother and sister Jenny sitting in the car, heater running full blast, the rest of us playing in the snow as if it were high summer. My father taking us around Pittsburgh to show us his haunts when he'd been a young boy - the trip beginning, of course, with Krispy Klondikes. 

Cherish those moments, when the light changes, and a heaviness comes to you. Those moments will sustain you in the dark. Trust me on this.