In Utero

I was talking to this nineteen year old girl yesterday. We were discussing her first and only love, her old neighborhood, and how her life was before she was forced to move out to the suburbs. Seriously, her body is that of a ninety seven year old woman, but when I start asking Mom about the photos I'm scanning she becomes young Lila again. The last few weeks I've been focusing on my dad's photo albums from 1940 to 1949, Pre-Alan. This is the period of time just before Mom and Dad got married, their time as newlyweds in the Army Air Force during World War II, and the immediate post war years. This was the Lila and Al that I never knew. From carefree teenagers to young parents barely in their twenties. Mom and I looked over photos of her and dad on a Mississippi River boat when Dad was stationed at Scott Air Base, across the river from Saint Louis. There were photos of the teenage Lila and Al with their young friends having a good time along the Chicago lakefront. Mom looked at the photo of herself looking out at the Adler Planetarium and she was reliving that day as if it just happened. Now if I ask Mom who visited her the day before, she has to think really hard. But show her a photo from nearly eighty years ago and she can tell you about the dress she was wearing and who was with her. As Mom and I moved up through the years in the photo albums, she asked me "When did we move out here?"

"1949 Mom, you moved out to Tinley Park in 1949. The year I was born."

"No, what month? I think it was November."

"I'm pretty sure it was more like March of that year." I told her, worried about contradicting her memory. Not that I was there. I just remember seeing that month and year written on photos of them moving in. Now that I think about it, I was either in utero or conceived in that first month they lived that house. Anyway, I decided to call the one person who is still alive and was there. My brother Dave. Sure, he was only four years old when they moved out of Chicago to the suburbs, but I was pretty sure he could remember something as big as moving away from Grandma's house. And I was right, Dave remembered. At least he remembered that it was springtime. So March or April, because Dave says it was muddy in Tinley Park at that time, and he remembered the weather. That means that Mom will have lived in Tinley Park for seventy years this spring. Seventy years, and she still has the same phone number from 1949. Different house, same phone number. Give her a call.