Carolynn Kingyens / The Friend of a Friend of a Friend
In September 1986, I was a petite, spunky 12½ year old with metallic braces that would sometimes scrape against the insides of my cheeks. By now, I had experienced my first French kiss, lasting mere seconds, with a popular boy, who attended a different school than me. My biggest fear, up to that point, was kissing a boy with braces as well, and us, somehow, getting interlocked, becoming temporarily conjoined. It was always the friend of a friend of a friend that this most embarrassing moment happened to, and it became kind of an urban legend within my circle of friends. Thankfully, the first boy I kissed was brace-free.
My first kiss attended a local Catholic prep school while I attended a small, Christian academy, where I was bussed into a different neighborhood altogether. At times, I felt like the odd-ball, non-Catholic in our predominantly Catholic neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia. It didn’t matter that I was baptized Catholic. I’ve seen the evidence of my baptism – polaroid photos of myself in a long, white Christening gown in front of St. Anselm’s Parish. I’ve seen even more evidence of my baptism – polaroid photos of my Godparents, an older sister and brother-in-law of my mother, my aunt and uncle, holding me in their matching, blue-checkered 70’s pantsuits and jet-black, Priscilla Presley-inspired hairdo. However, by the time I would enter primary school, my parents would have already left Catholicism for Evangelical Christianity, getting my fill of Jim & Tammy Baker, Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour, and Harold Camping’s Family Radio by the time I was 12. It felt like an invisible micro-chasm had formed overnight, when before there was no chasm at all. Suddenly, it was them and us. Us and Them. Them and me. Me and Them.
My memories sometimes come to me in snapshots, broken pieces, or in longer reels. Some come to mind faster than a freight car. While other memories come slower than a dripping faucet, but come they do. My fascination with memory reminds me of one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, “The Incredible World of Horace Ford.” Horace Ford is a 38-year-old toy designer obsessed with his happy childhood memories to the point of frustrating his colleagues, wife and mother. According to the episode’s Wikipedia page:
“One day, he decides to revisit his childhood neighborhood. Ford discovers, to his amazement, that it has not changed. He recognizes the boys he played with in his childhood – who have not aged. Frightened, he returns to his apartment, but he visits his old neighborhood again over the next several nights. On the last visit, he hears his old friends complaining that he did not invite them to his birthday party. He tries to talk to them, and suddenly turns into a boy again. His friends bully and assault him, as Horace realizes that his childhood was not as pleasant as he would have nostalgically recall. After his wife finds him, he “grows up” – returning to his own time period and age group with a new-found appreciation for life as an adult.”
I wonder if Horace Ford’s opening narration by the too cool and collected, Rod Serling, could easily be applied to me as well:
“Ms Carolynn Kingyens, who has a preoccupation with another time, a time of childhood, a time of growing up, a time of street games, stickball and hide-n’-go-seek. She has a reluctance to check out a mirror and see the nature of her image: proof positive that the time she dwells in has already passed her by. But in a moment or two she’ll discover that mechanical toys and memories and daydreaming and wishful thinking and all manner of odd and special events can lead one into a special province, uncharted and unmapped, a country of both shadow and substance known as the Twilight Zone.”
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