If you really want to know me, don’t ask where I live. Ask where I still drive by.
I don’t know if everybody does this. I imagine most people move on from a place and never feel the need to see it again. That’s never been me. Ever since I got my driver’s license, I’ve had a habit of turning down streets where I used to live. Before long, it grew into something bordering on an obsession. I slow down when I pass them, and for a moment the years disappear.
If I’ve got an extra fifteen minutes, I’ll turn off the main road and wander through neighborhoods where I used to live. Not because I want to go back. I love where I am, and I not only love remembering how I got here, I learn from it.
On Saturday and Sunday mornings, while I’m in my car driving from restaurant to restaurant, I tune in to SiriusXM’s replay of American Top 40 with Casey Kasem. Every weekend they replay the countdown from the same week in a different year during the 1970s. This past weekend it was 1973, and I was eleven years old. Before a song is halfway over, I’m remembering who I was with, where I first heard it, and what life looked like then. A three-minute song can take me back fifty years in the blink of an eye.
Apparently, this is a real thing. Scientists call it the “reminiscence bump”—the idea that the memories we form in our teens and twenties stay unusually vivid, especially when they’re tied to music and place. That may explain part of it. The rest is probably just the way I’m wired.
Sometimes I’ll drive by the little house where we lived until I was six. Sometimes it’s the neighborhood where I grew up after that, the one I called home until I graduated from high school. I’ll drive past my grandmothers’ house, where I lived in the garage apartment from 22 until 30 while opening Crescent City Grill. Eventually I bought that house. Some of my favorite childhood memories happened there, and some of the hardest and happiest years of my young adult life happened there, too.
I’ll pass the house where I took piano lessons before my teacher decided I wasn’t concert-hall material. Getting fired from piano turned out to be one of the better things that ever happened to me. That’s how I found the guitar. I’ll drive by another house and remember that’s where I first heard Led Zeppelin. I can still picture the upstairs bedroom.
Then there’s the house where my mother used to visit friends for cocktails. They’d sit in the den talking while I was in the living room with their boxer, Brutus, and a giant stereo console filled with Beatles albums. The stereo was so large it was considered furniture, which was common back then. I have no clue what the adults talked about, but I can still see those Beatles albums and Brutus lying there beside me.
Some people might look at my childhood and see what wasn’t there—a father, money, an easy road. That’s not what I remember. When my father died, my parents were planning to build a house in a new subdivision. My dad and several of his lifelong friends had all bought lots there. They were going to raise their families together, and then cancer changed those plans.
My mother had a decision to make. She could stay where we were, in a neighborhood with no children, or scale down the house plans, take a leap of faith, and build anyway. She chose courage, and it’s one of the bravest things she ever did. Because of that decision, I didn’t just grow up in a house. I grew up in a neighborhood, and not just any neighborhood.
The best neighborhood ever.
We moved there in 1968, and I graduated from high school in 1979. Looking back, I realize we caught lightning in a bottle. For a little over a decade, everything came together at exactly the right time. The parents were about the same age. Their kids were about the same age. We all grew up together.
When I run into friends from that neighborhood today—and sometimes I might not have seen them in ten or twenty years—the first thing one of us says often isn’t, “How’ve you been?” It’s, “Best neighborhood ever.” No explanation needed. We all know exactly what that means.
I don’t know that a neighborhood like that could ever happen again. People left their doors unlocked. We stayed outside until the streetlights came on because that’s where the fun was. There were only three television channels, and most of the time there wasn’t much worth watching anyway. Video games weren’t part of our lives unless somebody talked their parents into driving to the amusement center to play pinball, foosball, or maybe a crude game of Pong.
The neighborhood was our entertainment.
A bicycle leaning against a tree told you where your friends were. We lived on our bikes. We played football every day—winter and summer—in my friend Forrest’s front yard. We built tree houses in the woods. Every mother knew every kid’s name, every kid knew every dog’s name, and every father had permission to straighten out any child who needed straightening out. Nobody thought twice about it.
What made that neighborhood so special wasn’t just where it was or when it was. It was who was in it. We all experienced the same childhood together—the same games, scraped knees, music, television shows, jokes, victories, and heartbreaks. Those bonds weren’t built during big events. They were built one ordinary afternoon after another, over thousands of days that didn’t seem important at the time.
I often say I grew up without a father. That’s true, but it’s just as true that I grew up with a dozen fathers. One taught me responsibility. Another taught me what respect looked like. None of them tried to replace my father, but each of them filled a little of the space he left behind. They coached our teams, fixed our bicycles, showed us how to shake hands, corrected us when we needed correcting, and never acted like they were doing anything extraordinary.
They were.
Even now, when I’m traveling, I find myself doing the same thing. If I’m in a college town where I once lived or a place where I worked years ago, I’ll take the long way. In a couple of weeks the family will make our annual trek to Destin, and I’ll point out— for the 935th time— where I lived during the years when my daily schedule consisted of waking at 10, going to the beach, and waiting tables at night. My children will give me the familiar response: “We know, Dad.”
More than anything, I hope my wife and I are giving our children what my mother gave me: places they’ll want to revisit someday. I hope they’ll drive through our old neighborhood with no destination. I hope they’ll hear a song and remember an afternoon they’d forgotten. I hope they’ll bore their own children with stories that begin, “Right over there,” because that will mean they had a childhood worth remembering.
Maybe that’s why I keep taking the long way home. I’m not trying to go back. I love where I am and am excited about where I’m headed. Every now and then, an old road reminds me that before I became who I am, a whole lot of fine people had a hand in it. And that’s worth slowing down for.
Onward.
Banana Pudding
1 cup Sugar
6 Tbl. Flour
pinch of salt
4 Egg yolks (reserve whites for meringue)
2 cups Milk
2 tsp. Vanilla
6 Tbl. Butter
5 Bananas, ripe, peeled and sliced
Vanilla wafers
4 Egg whites
1 /2 cup Sugar
1 /2 tsp. Cream of tartar
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Combine sugar, flour, salt, eggs, milk and vanilla in a small non-reactive saucepot. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly until the pudding thickens. Remove from heat and slowly add butter until incorporated.
Butter a two-quart baking dish. Arrange the vanilla wafers around the outside and across the bottom of the baking dish. Spread a layer of custard over the wafers. Place sliced bananas on top of custard and spoon the remaining custard over bananas, spreading evenly.
Using an electric mixer beat the egg whites until they are increase in volume. Add sugar and cream of tartar. Beat to stiff peaks. Spread meringue over pudding and bake 8-10 minutes. Yield: 8-10 servings
(Robert St. John is a chef, restauranteur and published cookbook author who lives in Hattiesburg, Miss.)