Joanne Wilkinson

My daughter has become a basketball fan at her school, which means that two or three nights a week I drive there well after dark to pick her up. Tonight is a warmish night in late February, and as I exit the highway, the familiar streets around me steeped in decades of overlapping memories, high school and med school and young adulthood and middle age, I am slapped abruptly by a tidal wave of melancholy when my Amazon music playlist offers up, in all its wisdom, this old Genesis song called “Follow You Follow Me.”

It is one of many songs from high school – when I was growing up, feeling my own academic power like the whole world would be laid out in front of me for the taking, and equally important, falling in love with someone who actually seemed to like me back, and we were compatible and happy and he went to the same school I am going to pick my daughter up at, right now. Every once in a while one of these waves comes up and hits me like the uneven, unpredictable chop when you’re body-surfing and there is nothing you can do but let it push you off-course. My throat aches and I have a full-on sense memory of the front lawn of my daughter’s school, and the back circle, fluffy white blossoms from the ornamental trees showering down on us in the May breeze as we talked and laughed about college and summer jobs. I remember the way he used to smile at me, like he couldn’t quite believe it was real, and then giving in to it and grinning as if to say, No, it is, can you believe how cool this is?

I drive up Brant Avenue the same way I drove my grandmother’s old Volvo to meet him after school, the same way I ran up Brant after my long runs in college and med school, or drove to park illegally on the next block across from my med school apartment. The same way I drove here when we still lived in Boston and I was just visiting, when I was meeting my old friends for dinner on Main Street at a restaurant with the windows open to sidewalk seating. The streets of 1987 overlay the streets of 1989 and 1997, 2004 and 2015, and I’m still driving, just cresting over the hill at the front gate of her school, blasting Genesis out my open window and crying, although hopefully the college kids I pass at the hockey rink hear only the music and not the tears. What was I thinking, sending her to his school? What was I thinking, moving back here?

I think : I have to get out of here. At this point in my life, there is something really fiercely appealing about the idea of moving someplace totally blank, like Utah or Idaho or something, and pressing the big reset button. Selling all my furniture and my car. Starting over. Becoming a regular at some diner where no one knows me and there are no songs from the 80s rising up stealthily out of the dark night in my car on a perfectly nice early spring evening on a perfectly nice street to remind me that there are no do-overs, that this is my life here and now, my mess to clean up, my problem to fix, and more important, my daughter’s life. I talk a good game, but I’m not going anywhere, so I do the only thing that relieves the pressure of the moment and I let myself cry for the one long block before I turn in to campus, and then as I roll down toward the gym (I babysat for a family on this street back in 10th grade, because there is literally not a street in this town that I don’t have a story about), I close the moon roof and turn the music down and wipe my cheeks frantically so I’ll be calm and cheerful when my daughter opens the car door, which is, after all, the most important thing, that there be no quaver in my voice when I say, casually, “Did we win?”

Joanne Wilkinson is a physician and single mom who writes whenever she has the chance.