When I was little boy, snooping around, my mother and Jason’s mom were having this deep whisper talk.
I was too young to know the ‘key words’ or what I was really hearing, but there was something ‘under’ the words.
As I say I don’t know what was really being said but maybe a week later Jason and his mother moved away and I never saw them again.
Jason had been my best friend. Not seeing him was more than losing a ball or scraping a knee.
Yeah, I had other friends. other things to do, so it wasn’t as if this was a major trauma, but it mattered.
And although I grew up and moved on, something about that conversation between my mother and his mother banged around my head and I held the words, the ‘under current’ long enough to decipher what I had heard and match it to what I ‘knew’ and then, what it meant.
Many small moments like this will stay with us forever.
He remembers this because of words he kept until he knew what they meant.