...and I Lived in a Small Town...

Now that I planted that earworm, let me just begin by saying I’m still adjusting to being back behind the corncob curtain.  I know it seems odd since I lived here for 30 years, and fall semester for the last seven.  But I’ve learned that it takes about a month to make the transition.  Also, I realized that I can’t leave the house without running into someone I know (cue the earworm). 

I’m not talking about going out and purposely meeting someone for lunch or keeping an appointment with a dentist, I mean seeing at least one person from my past life wherever I go!  I’ve also seen a certain gold medal Olympic diver twice…all within my first two weeks.  I learned pretty quickly that I’d better make sure that I’m freshly showered, wearing decent clothes and have no corn stuck in my teeth.  However, what is a challenge is trying to recall 1) how I know this person; and 2) THEIR NAME!!  I view this as sort of my own personal game show, but without cash prizes or vacations to sunny destinations. 

Trying to figure out a person’s identity has to be done in a nanosecond if that person is right in front of you.  I’m rattling off thoughts like “do I know them from work; did they live in my neighborhood; is this a parent of one of Matt’s classmates; is this someone I know from a restaurant, bar, doctor’s office, etc.” and on and on.  The hard part is that I’m seeing these people outside the normal context within which I knew them:  at the post office, in restaurants, at the local “home desperate”, or in the grocery store.    Sometimes I get lucky and I spot someone at a distance and have an edge of running this mental program code in stealth mode by ducking down an aisle, under a table, or a behind a parked car.  However, I do have a bit of an edge going, well, two edges.  One, not too many people expect to see me here behind the curtain; and, two, since my hair is now white, people I haven’t seen in, well, a decade or more, definitely don’t recognize me. 

This week, I’ve seen someone who works at the office of my old eye doctor’s.  OK, that was a tough one; I should have gotten BONUS points for that recollection.  I guess this is a good sign both for my memory AND my vision.  Over the weekend, I ran into a former colleague while at a movie theater.   I surprised the hell out of her; it was such gleeful fun!  She certainly wasn’t expecting to see some ghost from her professional past turn up and say “Hi” while she was washing her hands in the restroom!  Restrooms are never places one EVER begins a conversation.  But hey, I’m behind the corncob curtain and a ghost from peoples’ pasts.  After her initial shock, we fell into a mini-reunion outside the restroom, along with her beau, one of my former softball teammates (cue the earworm).

I’ve seen a few people that I’ve known for 30 years, some casually, others that have been a close and important part of my curtain life.   Among those who did not expect to see me again, I’m greeted with “what are you doing here” or “didn’t you move to Florida”.  It must seem odd that I keep turning up in the fall, sort of like a seasonal corn character.  It has been nice to be remembered even by people who thought I was gone forever. 

But the reality is that this year is the last year that I will be showing up in unexpected places and running into people from my corncob past.  Who knows, maybe I’ll unexpectedly run across some Hoosiers in the Sunshine State where I might blurt, “What are you doing here”?