Dixie Cream

I can remember a time when I would save up a few coins and go to the Dixie Cream for a few donuts before school started.  Just one dollar could get you two donuts and a milk.  It was the breakfast of champions.  Last night, I dreamed of going back  home down south and I went into the same routine that I had when I was a young girl.  The only exception is that I was not a young girl.  I was a grown women who had not been back to that town since I was eighteen.  I looked for the Dixie Cream in the place that I last remembered it.  I was certain that it was where I left it.  It was not there.  As a matter of fact, it had moved a number of times.  By the time, I found it, it was on a block that did not even exist when I lived there.  I began to think how strange things are in our memories.  People and places get frozen in our minds like snapshots.  Not only has it not changed, but it remains in our memories as a moment that stretches as a lifetime.  We go back to those old places and look for the picture in the snapshot.  I woke up and thought about how disrespectful that had been.  It was like I did not give the place the chance to change like I changed.  Why did I expect them to remain the same when the person who went there when she was a young teenager did not exist anymore as well.  I can remember when an old college friend graduated.  Her father came and gave her a gift that was more fit for a child than for an adult, but that was what he remembered her as.  She was still his little girl.  He was still stuck not realizing that all the years of neglect had painted an ancient picture.  When he came with the gift, we all gaffed and wondered how he could still think this was appropriate.  I think that is what I am doing with parts of my life that I have been longing to go back to.  I think the place only exist in my mind.  I have been back home, in reality, momentarily for funerals and quick trips.  It has changed.  Houses that I used to live in have been torn down and most of my network of people have died.  I guess, I will don a black dress and have another type of funeral.  I guess it is time to bury the memory in my memory.  It is the only place it can and will live.

I go back Kenny Chesney
http://youtu.be/MdeSLxz5TTE

 

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