24 Day Street

I grew up on 24 Day Street in Clifton, New Jersey. A 2 bedroom apartment. With my parents, my older sister and me. Window air conditioners and radiators. Thin walls, smoke from my father's cigarettes and Mets baseball games on TV. My mother was an accountant for the state of New Jersey. Not sure what my father did or who he worked for.. No one ever said. And I never asked.
It was a big deal to pick out material to recover the living room couch. And wallpaper for the hallway near the kitchen. Speaking of the kichen...The table we sat at night after night till I was seventeen, was no ordinary kitchen table. It was a block of long rectangular shaped wood that sat up against the wall. If you could picture a family, night after night, facing a wall, not each other. Did I mention no-one was allowed to talk? The only audible sound was our forks picking up the next mouthful of food. No conversation. No voices. Nothing. Just the tines of the forks and an occasional knife to cut whatever my mother made that night for dinner. I still remember the hole my father made, slamming his fork into the table when my sister and I forgot the unspoken rule.
As I write this, I feel the same sick feeling in my stomach that I did back then. But playing the old tapes actually makes you relive the experience verbatim. All of it. Every thought. Every feeling.
Getting thru something doesn't mean reliving it. Just the opposite. You give yourself new experiences to replace the old ones. Self-Love. Self-Nurturing. And at some point, you realize you don't have to live there anymore. At 24 Day Street.