Faded Us

My former neighbor (Helen) and I went for a walk down the street last night to see how our old block was doing. We took her dog and greeted the old men hanging around outside the sneaker shop.

The sneaker shop has moved out of downtown.

"His business was all on the computer anyway," explained Larry, the sixty-some-year-old who'd lived in my former apartment when he was four. "So now we rent the store."

"We" was him and a gaggle of old men. Mostly Italian men, all from the neighborhood. There was a computer-printed sign taped to the curtained display window that had once held sneakers.

Members only.

"How does it work?" I asked.

"We each pay a hundred dollars a year. It's nice in there. We have a big TV and we can just hang out."

Cute. I'm pleased the guys have a hang-out. They used to hang out in front of the pizza shop and before that in front of the deli.

Helen and I walked around to our own block. We talked to some neighbors, who told us "facts" about our old building that were just theories we'd come up with when living there. "They didn't use primer the first time, they didn't paint it right."

"No," I explained. "That was our first thought but actually I have a photo of the building primed from 2002, before any of us moved in."

"Oh, well, they didn't use outdoor paint."

"No, that was one of our theories, but when we got it repainted, we made SURE it was the right paint. We later learned that cedar chips and you have to maintain it. Some people say you can use stain instead of paint."

They looked at us skeptically. Our theories from 2004 had become lore, fact on the block, our own conjectures passed back to us as certainties.

One of our neighbors thought Helen looked familiar but couldn't place her.

"We both lived right there," I explained, shocked.

And I realized.

The people on this block have been here for 60-70 years. We were just there for a few years each.

Forgotten already, just a couple single women passing through. The gossip we'd produced had become incorporated into the bible of the street, but our names and faces were already faded.