Memorizing memories

Recently a family member posted to social media pictures from a snowmobile/four-wheeler excursion on a frozen lake. A lot of snow was involved.

Having lived in the Carolinas since leaving western New York State for college, it’s been a while since I’ve been part of a scene like that. The place looked so foreign to me — like I was watching a documentary titled, “How Snow People Live.”

It’s a little scary at times to think life has taken me in a different direction. I have not been there to show family members I care for them; next thing I know, it’s too late to tell them. I live with regret knowing I probably wouldn’t recognize many of my childhood friends if I saw them today.

I am certainly guilty of not going “home” often enough.

BUT HERE IS MY REASON:

I love the place where I grew up. Absolutely, unequivocally adore it. No food I’ll ever eat in the South that’s available in WNY will ever be as good as it is up there. Don’t even try with chicken wings. Just give up.

This love is almost completely the reason I am as passionate as I am about the Buffalo Bills. I don’t give a damn about the individuals themselves — well, I do as much as I would any other stranger — but the team? That franchise? It’s the embodiment of home. When I root for the Bills, I’m pulling for what I remember my mom pulling for when I was a kid. I’m pulling for folks I don’t even know up there who are the definition of sincerity, generosity and diligence — qualities my travels have taught me don’t exist as profoundly in other U.S. cities.

(If you know what “bless your heart” actually means in the South, you’ll know what I’m saying here.)

I used to return home several times per year when I was in college. I’d be up there for close to a month when all I had to do was buy a plane ticket … which was usually funded by my dad. I’d go up there, drive one of my parents’ cars, stay in my childhood home, go to bars with friends, eat out every day and just have a good ol’ time.

It never stopped feeling like I never left.

Then life happened and I became a grownup with a child. I had a job — a real job. When I left the Carolinas, someone or something was actually missing me. So my trips home became shorter and less frequent.

I can’t remember on what trip it happened or what triggered the epiphany, or if an epiphany was even triggered at all, but at some point it began to feel less like home. Sure, a lot of that had to do with my acclimation to where I was living, but plenty had to do with where I am from changing.

“I love going to Olean,” I once heard a fellow transplant say. “It’s like a time capsule — nothing ever changes there.”

Well, the guy who owned Renna’s Pizza in the mall sold it and it stopped tasting like what made me salivate when I’d go there with my mom as a kid. If it hasn’t happened already, it won’t be long until that weird map of Italy on the back wall — “weird” because it was made of different colored pebbles, probably a cesspool of bacteria — is gone.

I want to remember it.

Speaking of the mall, like many other malls nationwide but seemingly more so with this one, it’s come to resemble a flea market. The only thing I like about this cesspool of crappy stuff is the terrazzo floor, which was identical to the same floor I used to look at tiredly as I followed my mom around the place in the winter, bored and sweating because she wouldn’t let me take my thick London Fog coat off in fear I’d lose it. I’d look at the same floor as I sat on the wooden bench with my grandma, outside of Hills Department store, as we waited for my mom to get done buying useless stuff for the house and Garth Brooks’ latest CD.

I want to remember it.

My high school? Forget about it. Driving up to it and seeing the cinder track replaced by one of those wussy rubberized surfaces across the roadway, the football field with lights, the hazardous baseball/softball fields backstops made of hazardous splinters scabbed together by a variation of chicken wire no longer there … I do not need to see what has happened inside of that school. The trees they removed where I used to wait for my parents to pick me up outside of the locker room after practice say it all. They probably have an escalator up to the Bear’s Cave by now. I don’t need to see modern lockers rooms or whatever security system the times have told officials they need to install. At this time, my high school is exactly how I remember it.

Exactly how I want it to stay.

AS TIME MARCHES ON AND PEOPLE CLOSE TO ME DIE, I realize all I have left are my memories of them. Now when I see terrazzo flooring, I think of the Olean Center Mall. And my mom in her 30s. And my grandma. And the dogs at home. Even the stupid cats we had at the time.

They are all gone in reality (Mom’s in her 60s now) but exist loud and clear in my memory. Should I ever go to this mall and see that it has new flooring, that would replace my memory.

I know this because I can no longer remember the taste of Renna’s Pizza. The real taste. I can’t remember the stores that adorned Union Street because they’ve all been replaced as part of some hippy nonsense “walkable Olean” project involving roundabouts replacing all of the stop lights. I can still recall standing in the middle of a closed-down Union Street for the official arrival of Santa Clause/lighting of the city Christmas lights, but I no longer remember it when I stand on this same ground because it has changed so much.

THE HOUSE WHERE I WAS RAISED has not seen me since those days when I’d go home for a visit in college. My parents moved out not long after. I know the family who bought the house; they are nice people.

But please, oh please, never put me in a situation where I must re-enter this house.

I have vivid, distinct memories of the details of that house. The way the door between the garage and breezeway never latched unless you slammed it while turning the knob; I used to jump through the doorway and into the garage as a kid, attempting to grab the door knob midair as I reached behind myself to pull it shut before my feet hit the garage floor concrete. There was a brown, wooden cabinet built in to the back wall of the garage; when dad would open it, the scent of chlorine would sometimes be overwhelming as this was where he kept the chemicals for the inground pool outback.

Properly using one of the other two doors to the breezeway required similar knowledge: the front door needed an even harder slam while the sliding glass doors that went into the back yard was next to impossible to lock. There was a second layer of glass door used only the winter that was impossible to lock.

Mom was so proud of the tile countertops they had put in. These were the days when money was more difficult to come by than it is today. A project like this was a big deal … and she made me so scared to spill something on the counter that I sometimes put my cup on the floor to fill it with a pitcher of Crystal Light in the fridge. And the “good” living room … the one with the hardwood floor. When we moved in, it was covered with hideous green carpet, but Dad and Uncle Ron pulled it out so Uncle Jimmy could sand, stain and refinish the wood.

It was, by far, Mom’s favorite part of the house.

And I could go on and on like this, and maybe someday I will but not today. I was on a walk yesterday morning when I allowed myself to touch the waters of the memories ingrained deep within the knots of my mind and it was incredible how much I remember. I know exactly what wooden steps to the second floor creaked the most … and just how cold the tile platform at the bottom felt on barefeet in the wintertime.

But one walk through this house today would replace all of these memories.

I don’t want to see what someone else has done to the house. Nothing wrong with them replacing the wooden fence around the back yard (I’m assuming they have), but — damn it — I remember helping my dad and uncle put this up and my sister fighting August sun to paint the existing fence panel by panel while I picked on her from inside the pool.

If I see the house without these things, that’s how I would remember it … not like I do today … like it was throughout my childhood.

So the next time someone close to you moves away and you’re wondering why they never come back, it could be they are snobs who forgot about you. Yeah, you can talk about that among others who think like that.

But it might not be the reason.

Just remember the adage that each person is fighting a battle you may know nothing about. For me, I struggle every day with my preference for sentimentalism. It’s a curse. When I die, if I go to Heaven, I know a part of it will include my ability to revisit these things: my children when they were babies, the Olean Center Mall, my mom before she was 40, Grandma, aunts and uncles who have passed, the house on Pleasant Acres Drive the way it was between 1989 and 2004, racing Matt McBride up the slight hill between his house and mine on our BMX bikes and my old high school how it was when I was there.

I don’t need any new memories of those places — I like the memories I have.

And that is why I rarely visit my hometown.