Highland Park, Illinois, Christmas 1960
Some memories stay with you, not because of what they became, but because of what they never did.
In the early 1960s, we lived in Highland Park, Illinois, near Fort Sheridan, where my father was stationed. I was very young, yet pieces of that time have remained with me, quiet and steady, as if they were waiting for me to come back and notice them again.
I remember the trip there from Opelousas. Not the whole journey, just a moment. Sitting on a bed in a motel room, watching my father walk out the door to get ice. I have never been certain whether that memory belongs to our trip north or a return visit south. It does not seem to matter. The moment itself stayed.
We lived in an upstairs apartment above a house. There were outside steps that led to our door, and another door inside that led to a staircase down into the homeowner’s part of the house. I opened that door more than once and was told not to. One day, I stepped onto those stairs and fell. I do not remember the fall itself as much as I remember what followed. I never opened that door again.
There was snow. Real snow, not something imagined. My mother bundled Glenn and me into snowsuits and took our picture at the corner across the street. Coming from Louisiana, it felt like something new, something that belonged to a different kind of world.
The lake was just a few blocks away. Lake Michigan. I remember the sand, the water, the feeling of being there more than any single detail. My mother took pictures of us at the beach, but I have never found them. Still, I can see it in my mind, and that has always been enough.
My father sometimes walked to work at Fort Sheridan, leaving the car for my mother. The houses around us were different, the air colder, everything unfamiliar and yet, somehow, it simply became where we were. Not better. Not worse. Just another place we called home for a while.
And then there was Christmas.
That Christmas, I received a toy piano.
I remember it clearly, though not because I loved it. I pressed the keys a few times, enough to hear the sound, enough to know it was not something I would stay with. I never learned to play. There was no moment of discovery, no growing interest. It simply passed through my hands and out of my life.
I was given a large doll that same Christmas, nearly as tall as I was. That doll mattered more. I remember falling asleep with her, my mother taking a picture of us together. For a time, she felt important, but even that faded. I do not remember what happened to her after we left Highland Park. Only that she was once there.
My grandmother sent me a purple velvet dress that year. She often mailed clothes to us when we were far from Louisiana. Those packages felt like a connection to something steady, something that did not change even when everything else did.
Next door, there was a stone house where an elderly couple lived. Their grandchildren would come to play with Glenn and me. The girls were older and kind. They picked flowers and placed them in my hair. My mother took pictures, capturing moments I might not have remembered otherwise.
There was a pool at the neighbor’s house, and we were sometimes allowed to swim. There are photographs of that, too. Proof of moments that might have slipped away if they had not been held onto in that way.
Inside, I remember sitting in a small chair watching Kids Say the Darnedest Things with Art Linkletter. My mother asked me to look up, and she took my picture. She did that often. Sometimes for my grandmother. Sometimes for my father when he was away. Because of her, pieces of our lives were saved, even the ones that seemed ordinary at the time.
I do not remember Glenn much inside that apartment. I remember him outside. Running, playing, existing in motion more than in stillness.
Family came to visit from Louisiana, and that always felt important. Familiar faces in an unfamiliar place.
My father later told me we liked eating hoagies from a nearby restaurant. He called them po-boys. I do not remember the sandwiches, but I remember him coming home with a bag of food and Glenn and me sitting at our small table to eat.
There are small memories like that. A freezer my parents bought and brought home. Years later, I mentioned it to my father, and he did not remember it at all. But I did. That is how memory works. We each carry different pieces of the same life.
We were only there for about ten months before my father was reassigned to Korea, and my mother, Glenn, and I returned to Opelousas.
Years later, I went back.
On a trip to Michigan, my husband Larry and I made a detour so I could see the house again. It looked smaller than I remembered. It always does. But standing there, something shifted. I could see us again, Glenn and me, playing between the apartment and the stone house. The past did not feel so far away.
I never learned to play the piano.
But that little piano stayed with me anyway.
