11:10 A.M.
11:10 a.m. The sound of tires screeching on the pavement jolted my attention back to the present. A battered Buick had lurched to a stop only a few feet in front of my rented Lexus. I had allowed my mind to wander from the shingle-sided buildings and the heavily-barred windows of the neighborhood passing by outside. It was a blistering hot summer day. The heat rising from the pavement made images appear to move gently in a breeze that wasn’t there. Traffic inched along between stoplights that seemed to take forever to change. Without even thinking about it, I had reached for the electric door locks several blocks back.
I felt completely out of place in a place that had been home until I left for college, a little more than thirty years ago. Once familiar street corners now looked as though I was seeing them for the first time. The old drugstore where we bought “penny candy” was now a pharmacy superstore, complete with a drive-through lane. I drove past the barbershop where I used to sit on a board laid across the arms of the chair so that the barber could reach me without bending over. The windows and doorway were bricked up. The limestone bank where everyone in the neighborhood kept their life savings had been knocked down and replaced by a concrete parking garage. On the sidewalk was a kiosk with a cash station machine.
Up ahead on the right was St. Basil’s Church. Magnificent from a distance with its stone walls and twin steeples, each home to a bell tower, on closer inspection, it was showing its age and then some. Built to last forever by immigrants for whom the church was their foothold in a new country, St. Basil’s was from another time. I went to grade school at St. Basil’s. I was an altar boy here, when the Mass was said in Latin and no one ate meat on Fridays. To my friends, I was Mike, but to the nuns and priests of St. Basil’s, I was Michael.
Now, inching my way through traffic, I watched the old neighborhood slip past. I was looking at the road, but my mind had gone back in time. I nearly slammed into the Buick when the unmistakable sound of tires on pavement suddenly brought me back. With my turn signal on, I returned my attention to the two steeples, and to the task at hand. It had been years since my folks had moved away from the old neighborhood, and even longer since I had left. What brought me back today was a need to close a loop in my life. A need for closure. A need to say goodbye to an old friend. I came home to bury Father Tim.