They were twins, though opposite in every way. One wore his hat high in the back, then angled it down with the brim low over his eyes. The other had his brim sticking straight up so high you could read the Gettysburg address on it from 10 feet away. He was tall, slender, energetic, and light-hearted. He looked like the type of kid who went fishing a lot. His brother, on the other hand, was built like a fireplug and somehow at age 12 already embodied the seriousness of a state trooper leaning against your car window. I met them playing travel baseball in Wexford.
They lived in a small house with a big walk-out basement. For us, that was the place to be. There was a 19" TV on a stand so narrow they had the NES resting on top so the controller cords partially obscured the screen. The ping pong table had one intact paddle and zero intact balls. There were two attached rooms that I assumed were laundry and storage, but the short hallways to get to them were dark and spooky so I was disinclined to get close enough to see. The clothesline just outside the basement door was in full sun and looked like something out of a movie set in the 50s.
Their house was in a rural part of town, where the lawns were wide open so the grass always got scorched in summer. And it was definitely summer. I could see the haze rising from the road when I looked across their front yard and no matter how hard I squinted, I was all but blind by the time we paused our whiffle ball game and went in for lunch. Their dad was in the kitchen washing some grime off his hands from working on the family Oldsmobile. He was blue-collar. Grizzled, but warm and friendly. He made me feel genuinely welcome, almost as if I stood on equal footing with his boys. He seemed a great deal older than my father. So much so, in fact, I pondered fleetingly if he was actually their grandfather. He lingered for a moment as we made our sandwiches to get a sit-rep on our plans for the day. Predictably, our plans were to "do fun stuff", but that's as much detail as we could muster.
And this is where my details run out. It's been thirty years since then. I remember the boys. I remember their dad. I remember their house. But how long did I spend with them? Was it one night? A weekend? A whole week? I have dozens of vignettes like this floating around in my memory, waiting for me to look the other way so they can disappear and join all the millions of things I've already forgotten. Like the names of the twins. Gun to my head, I wouldn't be able to pick their last name out of a lineup.
There's also a zone of fondness in these memories that seems to fall between the ages of 11 and 13 for me. It was a somewhat tumultuous time for my family, and maybe that's part of it. In times that were more stable, maybe the need to amplify the good while suppressing the bad was less pronounced, so those times are more of a blur. The time gap for memories prior to age 11 is growing, and with it grows the shroud of haziness over most of what happened. After age 13 was high school, where I started to think about what to do with my life and suffer all the anxiety and uncertainty therein. But between those two periods, my memories are summarized in my consciousness as what could only be described as pure childhood. I was old enough to have the amount of autonomy necessary to embark on unsupervised adventures, but young enough to fall exempt from the worries and consequences of being a young adult.
I have to wonder if this is the same for everyone. Do the deepest, most vivid jolts of nostalgia attach to memories from this same age gap, or is it all defined by our circumstances? If someone has a completely unstable childhood, does everything become a suppressed blur? What ages do your fondest and most vivid memories come from?