It was like that for me when we drove up in front of this house.
The adventure began not long ago when Kristin suggested that I ride up to Costco with her. Venturing into an area where I had not been for years, maybe even decades, I started recognizing street names from my childhood. I recalled a terrible accident at the end of Magnolia Homes Road. Daddy took us up there and it was my first impression about what carelessness behind the wheel of a car could do. It was a wooded dead end back then, but shivers went up my spine as we crossed on the new highway.
On the way home we played a memory game. Could I remember the way to get to the place where I grew up? Amazingly, I did! The stables at Riverside Acres were missing - or at least, I did not see them. The dirt road where I was tossed off the back of a horse, into a dry creek bed, was paved and different today, but the memory remained. I recognized certain houses as we turned into the neighborhood, though the names did not come to me. (They did later - Tommy Martin, Jackie Holton, Mrs. Peretsky, Bob and Nancy -Sandi and Bobby Brunner, the Deals, Mr. Flowers....)
Then we saw this house. It was almost like I stepped back into elementary school. It looked exactly like my house. Remarkable how a family with four children grew up in such a small space. I don't really remember it being all that small though. We had huge poinsettias under those front windows, and on the garage part was a prickly pyrocantha (crown of thorns) bush that was evil. My mom had it so we would get an idea what pain was involved for Jesus with that crown of thorns. I will never forget that lesson! It is not a bush you want to get tangled up in.
We had a carport, a breezeway, a laundry across from the breezeway, and some kind of storage unit where daddy had all kinds of strange things - he was a collector of randomness.
This house was different though. This house did not belong to us - even though ours, only 3 doors down, looked exactly like it. This one belonged to a neighbor named Joe Gray. It seems to me that Joe was this really nice 'older brother' of the family and we played with his siblings. Either that or he was a young father with small children. I did not realize it at the time, but he was a firefighter.
How do I know this? One day when we were dating, Roger and I took a drive back to where I grew up. (I was not living there at the time) and when he started driving down the street he said 'I've been here before." How weird is that! I had already learned that about everywhere that Roger went with me, he knew at least one person, but really - to my childhood street? What are the chances?
My home already looked pretty different by 1972 (we moved in 1968) but most of the area looked the same. We drove past my house -and I was starting to tell him about Hurricane Donna and the flooded area at the bottom of the hill. Then, just three doors down, he stopped the car and said - right here - my buddy lived here! WHAT? Joe the firefighter was a friend of YOURS?
Doing a little bit of math - I calculated that since I lived in that house from the time I was in second grade until I was in 10th grade - and that Roger graduated from high school when I was in second grade - it was entirely possible that he and I were on that very same street at the very same time.
Now, had I been a teenage girl at the time, I am quite sure I would have noticed him, but at elementary school age, I was far too busy with sand spur wars and climbing orange trees to be bothered with cute firefighters.
Roger's Lesson: He thought that was the funniest thing EVER. This only goes to show why he would say "You need to pay attention to what is going on around you and talk to the people you meet and learn something about them."
Well, he did that for a lifetime, I can say that. He knew more people, and more about their stories than I will ever hope to know in my lifetime. He could talk to someone for 5 minutes and learn the most interesting thing about them. And he would never forget them either.
It would be fun to have a time machine and roll it back 50 years to see if we were there at the same time! It does not matter though. God allowed our paths to cross when they needed to (see May 12) and I'm pretty happy that nobody else snatched him up in all those years while he was waiting for me to grow up!
God's timing - it is everything!
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