The Long Street
I lived on Long Island from October of 1994 to August of 2012, when I left to pursue my undergraduate degree at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. When that didn’t work out, I landed at Binghamton University in the southern tier of New York. I spent the next four years in Binghamton, which became my second home, before picking up again and settling in Philadelphia for the next chapter.
Throughout these years, I returned to Long Island every few months for holidays, special occasions, or just because I missed the beach. And each time I’ve gone back, the flood of memories that return to me are more and more unsettling.
I thought, when I moved from Binghamton straight to Philadelphia, that I had dodged the whole move-back-in-with-your-parents-after-college thing. But in 2019, nearly four years since my college graduation, I found myself with a head injury that landed me right back in my parents’ house for an indeterminate length of time.
The memories snuck up on me everywhere I went. When I would step into the Williston Park Diner, there I was in the booth, conveying my latest musings to my mom over challah french toast. And there I was again at the big corner table, surrounded by my high school friends, eating cheesy french fries and snickering when people we knew walked in. And when I cut through the elementary school field, there I was, standing on the swing with one foot, pumping with the other, and Alison slumped over the next swing on her stomach, knees up, arms hanging.
The next neighborhood over from mine is sectioned off by five main roads. This Utah-shaped expanse of houses is where my little hamlet of Albertson ends and the village of Williston Park begins. The longest way across, from I.U. Willets Road to Hillside Avenue, is just over a mile. Almost every street running perpendicular between these roads dead ends somewhere along the way, at the park, or the library, or behind the big shopping center. Only one street can take you all the way through. Though this street is only a mile long, it has three different names. On my side in Albertson it’s called Miles; then for two little transitional block it’s Wentworth, and then it’s called Collins for the rest of the way. I like picture Mr. Miles, Mr. Wentworth, and Mr. Collins shaking hands over this agreement.
In my first memory of walking down this street, I was no more than five years old and walking with my mom to meet my brother’s little league team for a celebration at the park. When you’re five, any journey a mile or more is usually a car ride. But this was one of the earliest days of Spring, and my mom decided we would walk.
Without our jackets, we felt light outside in the sun. I don’t remember the beginning of the walk, as I was used to walking in our neighborhood. The memory begins on the other side of I.U. Willets Road which to me, due to an undeveloped sense of distance and continuity, may as well have been China.
The rest of that walk was a remarkable journey. I reveled at the garden arrangements, mailboxes and Easter decorations in this new world I never knew existed. I picked up leaves, flowers and rocks along the sidewalk and investigated them as if I’d never seen anything like them before. And I swear I remember hearing the sound of a rooster crowing from one of the backyards.
When I got a little older, Mom and I walked on this street all the way to the end, where Carvel sat on the corner of the main road. Although the closest ice cream shop to us was a quarter of the distance, Carvel’s soft serve was enough to motivate us.
In middle school, I sometimes walked home with my friend Haylie, who lived around the corner and stole here mom’s lighters to set things on fire. When we had nothing to do after school, we sometimes took the long way home, going down Collins to Wentworth to Miles, making up stories about the families who lived there based on what their houses looked like.
In high school, Williston Park was the neighborhood with all the “fun houses,” where parents’ policies stated that they would rather us drink in the house where they could watch us. And so, after many a night spent in various backyards of Williston Park, I fluttered home down the long street, dizzy and happy, Bud Lite swooshing around in my stomach as my shadow lengthened and shrunk, lengthened and shrunk between the street lights.
I remember once, in a fit of adolescent despair, being propelled down the long street and around the corner to a house where I knew my friend was having band practice and knocking on the door. We sat for a long time on the sidewalk, where I let loose a long stream of laments amounting to little more than how sad and unfair it all was, everything.
I experienced the first great pains of my life on Long Island. Grief, failure, and heartbreak. And then, when I was 24, there was the great pain in my head. I went home to sort that one out, too. And at that time, with no job, no school work, and specific instructions not to do too much of anything, I did a great deal of walking.
Many of these walks took me down some stretch of the long street where I thought I was done making memories. And each time I walked there, another memory would appear, sometime baring itself to me with arms waving, sometimes ascending only up to my subconscious, coloring my other thoughts.
I suppose that if you spend enough time in a place, the old memories start to get buried by new ones, and you can walk past the bench where you had your first kiss without thinking twice about it. How else could those who stay in one place forever survive? Maybe the intermittent nature of my visits are the reason home can be so haunting. It’s the distance that does it, tells you which memories are important, for some reason or another.
It’s not wise, most would say, to dwell on the past. And yet it’s hard to look away when your mind shows itself to you. Lying down in the snow, looking over the empty field. Squeezing through the gap in the fence. Wandering down the long street.
