Senses ©

You know how your senses can trigger a memory sometimes?
We tend to associate different memories with another piece of information to help us remember something.
Like right now I am listening to a song about being born in a time of poverty, surrounded by violence and what had to be done to survive in that world while at the same time being able to see what’s on the other side of the horizon if he had been born a little more fortunate.
He says his eyes first opened upon a violent world and a violent world closed them in the end.
It does have a happy ending.
As he lay there dieing he could see in his mind his pregnant wife crossing to over the horizon with the money he stole.

This brought up a talk I had with one of the boys I grew up with from the beginning of time.
He was telling me about his kids and how well they were doing.
Both are university graduates with promising careers.
You could see how proud he was.

We joked around about how we fought up through the streets to get this far in life.
How we battled the system so that we can run wild and free at the same time trying to scratch out an existence any way we could.
He reminded me how crazy we were back then.
I reminded him how old we are now.
Not that I wouldn’t go to war with these old geezers because I know they’d step up to the plate even today but we may need a case of Geritol to get them going.

From the time we were kids I remember he used to be tight with his coin.
As he got older he did his thing and disappeared he didn’t stick around like the rest of us and party the night away.
Might be one of the reasons he didn’t get busted as much as the rest of us.
But he did and got it worse than any of us ever did.
We talked about that a bit and he said it was all worth it when he looks at what his family has today and what his kids didn’t have to go through to get where they are today.

I look at what my father had from where he came from and what he offered me even though we lived in poverty.
He gave me more than what he ever had and today I do the same for my kids trying to give them something more than what I had.
We have to climb life’s ladder one rung at a time and sometimes it takes generations to reach the top.

I walked down the street the other day to the main drag where I practically grew up and look at what the city has done to my memories.
All summer the city has been fixing up the sidewalks and roads putting in new landscaping.
Making it pretty I guess.
Once upon a time this wasn’t a pretty place.
It was ugly, gray, stained with the blood and souls of a generation who wandered within its boundaries.
This was home.
You could still hear the souls screaming through the cracks on a cold windy autumn night.
I stood in front of the donair shop remembering Frank trying to stuff his intestines back into his belly while he begged for people to help him stay alive.
I saw his sister a few months ago and she said he has been locked up in his house for the last ten years since he got out of jail.

I walked through the mall and I could see a bunch of kids hanging out at the front doors fucking around with each other and some of the pedestrians walking by.
They had their backpacks from school and had gathered here, as it’s the main stop for most of the buses throughout the city.
They hang around here for a couple of hours meeting up with schoolmates or making new friends from other schools like we used to when we gathered at the various school yards and parks in my time.
In my time we didn’t have backpacks or pens to carry home.
The only sharp object I carried was the razor sharp buck knife in my back pocket.
Today the pen is mightier than the sword or switchblade as it should be.

During the summer while sitting here enjoying two of my favorite desserts, fresh ice-cold strawberries dipped in melted chocolate served by a very lovely and tasty lady.
It wasn’t so much the taste of the chocolate or strawberries that triggered the next memory.
Or the taste of licking the drippings off of her naked belly but licking the drippings off of her pussy that reminded me of someone 20 years ago.
It was no one special yet the memory remains as clear as I had done it yesterday.
A farm girl I met one night at a bar I had no business being in that ended up in a small loft apartment.
Naked on the floor we sat eating strawberries she had brought from her mother’s farm.
She poured the pinkish juice left in the bowl on her belly and asked me to lick it off.
My tongue followed the trail all the way down to mingle with the sweetest part of her.

A couple of weeks ago my mother asked me if I could get her some Greek moonshine through one of my connections.
My mother doesn’t drink, maybe half a beer on Christmas then she passes out on the couch for a couple of hours so I figured she needed some for some cookie recipe as many of her cookie recipes involve booze.
Maybe that’s why everyone likes them.

The other day while I was out, I bumped into a friend and I remembered what my mother wanted and I asked him for some Tsipouro.
This stuff can’t take the paint off of a car hood.
He said he shouldn’t have a problem procuring me a bottle from a friend of his who just returned from Greece with a couple of cases.

The next day he stopped by and we smoke a couple of joints and he gave me the bottle while we sat down talking about various subjects.
After he had gone I went next door to my mother and gave her, her bottle of fire water, which made her really happy.
I figured tomorrow we were going to have cookies for sure so I went home.

Today I hopped over to my mother’s and as I walked into the kitchen there was a scent in the air.
Like booze.
I looked at the oven but it was empty and there wasn’t a cookie tray or dish full of cookies anywhere is sight but I could still smell something strong.
Strong enough to make the paint peel off of the walls.
So I asked her what kind of cookies she made with the Tsipouro.
She looked at me and said, “Are you crazy, that stuff will kill you. I use it to rub my aching muscles”.

There you go; my momma’s a cookie.

Have a nice day

Walker