Beltane New (Solstice) Moon
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had interactions with folks from Alexandria, Indiana resulting from a reader posting a blog entry, a 50’s boyhood, to an Alexandria Facebook 
site. It’s been interesting. The most interesting interaction has come from an old classmate who found my memories romanticized. You can see her comment under Who.
(1st)
I wrote her and in doing so discovered that she was a girl (then) who had done very well in our class, but didn’t (apparently) get the recognition she felt she deserved. I had to reflect that could have been true. Sexism (though not named) was alive and well back then and I’m sure it effected teacher’s perceptions and other students opinions. It may have helped me to some awards and recognition. Impossible to parse out now at this remove, but I’d never thought of it until she wrote.
Having said that I want to add that happy memories are not necessarily romanticized. 
That’s a word used by an outside observer. As resident in those memories, they were happy. Being a kid among kids is a great way to spend time when you’re young. Sure, we had our hassles, too. Our arguments and fights. I remember one incident where a next door neighbor pulled my pants down in front of my friends. This was the nuclear option at the time. I thought life was over and I could never face anybody again. Until the next day of course.
(3rd)
Once my life moved away from Monroe Street it began to take on a more serious, turning toward adult tone. We had a house on Canal Street, one we owned, rather than rented. In junior high I remember a fight with Rodney Frost, a bad one by the standards of the day. (low) Rodney died several years ago and my first memory when I saw his obituary was of that 6th grade fight near the junior high school.
Girls remained a mystery for me well into college, so I had the normal ration of pre-teen 
and teen angst over dating, sex and self worth. Those were not happy memories. My father and I began to part ways emotionally during junior high, a fact I credited only much later to a growing unease he had with my intellectual maturing. When this distance had reached its maximum, around my senior year of high school, my mother had a stroke and died seven days later.
(4th)
Those months and the years following them were more than unhappy times. They were a constant struggle for self-worth capsized often by grief and the estrangement I had with my remaining parent. This was just the way it was. Do I wish it could have been different? 
Of course. Do I know it won’t be. Yes, I do.
That period and its attendant miseries are now in my past, but they are in my past and they show up whenever I visit that period or that place, Alexandria.
(third phase)
