Pass The Quilt

My Parents have lived in the same place in Southeast San Diego for almost 30 years.  As my car sat in the garage, a reflection of the neighborhood shown on my back window.  I thought it looked nice enough to take a pic.  Then it made me think.  Though the details have changed in how some of the houses look, it feels like nothing had changed.  The neighborhood was the neighborhood.  Then oddly enough, the day after I took this pic, I walked down the street and found childhood friends in a random congregation.  Everybody lives somewhere else, but their parents still lived in the ‘hood, and out of no where an unplanned reunion happened.  And it made me think back to that reflection on my car. 

We grew up in a Filipino community where everybody’s parents worked, and the children were represented in large numbers in all age groups.  We grew up raised by syndicated sitcoms and cartoons when indoors, and literally ran the streets in the outdoors, playing sports and otherwise.  Our parents played roles like a village.  Whether it is a school carpool in morning by a Mom with a van, or someone hemming everybody’s clothes.  Or supplementing the community with a food specialty like empenadas, or someone else with puto.  People did stuff for each other and life was rich.

So, why would I ever want to move away from all of that?  Some people haven’t.  But for me, it’s like that reflection.  I have seen new things, and learned new stuff, and while all of that has happened the details of what I left behind had evolved as anything would.  But all the good things, the memory of the spirit remains.  And nature has a way of periodically bringing people to remind us of the good parts of the past picture.  We’re all capable of revisiting a picture that was good, and do it all while blazing a new trail of experiences.  No matter how the picture changes in my rear window every time I park my car at mom and dad’s, the history permeates the current image and the neighborhood is still the same great place it was when I was 5, when I was 10, when I was 15, and now that I am 30.  I don’t feel like I ever leave anything behind…