Remember the time I fell upside down and hung by my shoe and my two twist ponytails got caught in a tree and we had to pick the needles out for 3 hours? No, I didn’t remember it either. Until now.

Last week, facebook connected me to a friend I grew up with.  We met at 6, dated by 8, made out by 9.  Broke up by 9.5.  Then it was over until I tried to flirt my way into his heart during our college years at Wayne State.  He now says he turned me down then because he “was a total dooch bag.”

Hillarious, no?

After 12 years of going our separate ways, Jay & I discussed one very important thing last week: the old hood.

Have I mentioned before how little of my childhood I can pull together?  Those hidden years have been playing a mean game of hide-and-seek.   Try as I might they’ve been locked away refusing to come out and play.

As if to taunt me.

Suckers!

Talking to Jay about life on Braile brought back so many memories.  In particular -and oddly- the good ones.  I think the good ones have been lost as I have spent such a signigicant amount of time re-telling the horrors, so as to prove the gargantuan amount of redemption God has done in my life.

In that way, I forgot how much fun I had growing up in the Detroit urban jungle.

I forgot all these kids who I loved.  All these real people who are grown up now.  With babies, careers and such.

I remembered how once I ran through Jerald’s car-parts-filled garage and a piece of sharp wood hanging from the ceiling tore my head open and I laughed at the hysterical reactions of my friends as blood ran down my face.  Pinky swear, it didn’t hurt!

I remembered how Jay once pushed me off his gate (yes, that I was standing on during a raucous round of hide-and-seek) and my shoe got caught in the wire.  I fell backwards upside down and hung there with not only my shoe but hair caught in this giant fir tree looming over his house.  I remembered how he bent down to look at me face to face and ask if I was okay before he and the rest of the gang proceeded to laugh at my demise.

I had forgot that!

We talked about how we would all go down in Missy’s basement and learn all the latest dances…or how we all sat on my porch playing Monopoly until we couldn’t take the mosquitoes any longer.

I remembered how hard Missy made us laugh when we got a great round of “Yo Mama” jokes going.  Missy always said she loved to get me laughing so hard I got down on all 4’s and started snorting.  I must confess, I still snort but refrain from the weird I-have-no-strength-left-in-me-to-even-hold-myself-up pose I used to assume back in the day.  And when she would imitate me?  Oh man, we all just lost it.  I mean we were beside ourselves.  Missy was a one woman show.  The comedian of the block.

What I wouldn’t give to find her.

Jay remembered kids I didn’t and which ones got on our nerves.  It was the little things you know?  Things like how we all chased each other, raced and rode our bikes around a parking lot at the end of our street as opposed to an actual park just around the corner.  Just remembering “our parking lot,” brought back 6 pages of memories I wrote in a scribbled frenzy.

We were all around the same age: Jay, Jerald, NeNe, KiKi, Esau, Billy, Willy, Michael, Will, Sterling, Kofi, Quaku, Pierre & Missy.  We were a team of sorts.  All those boys.  Missy & I.  We were tomboys with a touch of girl.  Football wielding, hide-and-seek playing, scrape-our-knees, wrestling tomboys who got away to play with make-up when all the boys acted like, well, boys.

It’s been a crazy ride this last week reconnecting with an old friend, embracing nostaligia, remembering new memory snapshots from a life pushed aside and making significant progress on the memoir I dream of one day publishing.

Two and a half years ago something wildly similar happened when I reconnected with Jerald.  Like Jerald, Jay didn’t know about my Dad.  And like Jerald I didn’t know that Jay had been shuffled through 11 schools before he hit 12th grade.

We loved and accepted one another.  No bullies, no fighting (okay, very little fighting) no favorites.  We were just each other’s dawgs.

None of us knew the internal world the others faced.

Bizarre.  Sobering.

Ahhh, the wonder of facebook…

How has facebook flipped your life upside down lately?