Michael Fogleman

I was born at 1:19 in the morning on January 1st, 1982. I missed being the first 1982 baby to be born in the hospital by 5 minutes. My parents were very young (19 and 22). My father was in the Air Force and we were living near Pope AFB around Fayetteville, NC. My mother was a housewife and dedicated a significant portion of her life to raising me and my younger sister. For the first year or so of my life, we lived in a small trailer park near the base. Raising a family on a single mediocre income doesn't allow for much more. We later moved to another trailer park that was slightly nicer. This neighborhood, Cooper's Ranch in Spring Lake, NC, is home to my earliest childhood memories.

Our humble home rested on a small lot full of trees, dirt and pine needles. Across the road was a pond with a dirt path around it that we would often walk on. To get to school, my mother would walk me to the bus stop at the neighborhood entrance each morning. I rode my bicycle in the yard and in the street around the house. When my father raked all of the pine needles in the yard, I would help carry them to the woods behind the house. I remember eating popsicles on the front deck and I remember creating "roads" in the dirt with my father and "driving" my toy cars on them. There was a lake at a nearby neighborhood with ducks and we would feed them pieces of old bread. In the backyard there was a dogwood tree that had several trunks and I enjoyed standing in the center of the trunks and peering out. We had several neighbors with children our age, including my then best friend Jesse. I remember playing on a slip n' slide with our friends and I remember the time we ate frog legs from frogs in the pond. (Yes, they tase like chicken.) Of course, I have several more memories from this part of my childhood but it would require writing a book to cover them all.

In September of 1990, when I was 8 years old, we moved to Kathleen, GA and took our trailer with us. We stayed in Georgia until 1998 when we moved to Greensboro, NC. It is now November 2006 and until just a few days ago I had not been back to Spring Lake, NC. My entire perception of the neighborhood that we lived in resided in my head as 16 year-old faded memories. During my visit to my parent's home for Thanksgiving this year, we decided to take a trip back to where we lived. We first visited the trailer park that we lived in when I was first born. The trailer park is now abandoned but the trailer that we lived in is still there in the same spot. I have no memories of living there but I did recognize the house from old photographs.

We then went to Cooper's Ranch and I was in awe at what I was seeing. Things were very different but simultaneously extremely familiar. This neighborhood was now also deserted (perhaps because of the war in Iraq, being a military town, or because of increased military salaries). The lot we lived on and the surrounding lots were empty. The cement patio that was in our front yard was covered by earth (but still partially visible) and a significant number of trees, including all of those that were in the front lawn, were gone. The yard that my father could never get grass to grown in was now full of grass, perhaps due to improved access to sunlight. The woods in the back were much thinner than I remembered. Everything was smaller than in my memories. The width of the road, the distance from our lot to the end of the road, the size of our yard. I'd grown so much since being there that my perceptions regarding scale were quite different. I had a blast looking around at everything I remembered and pointing out how different everything had become. After the initial experience, however, a heavy feeling hit me hard. My childhood is gone. The empty lot and run down neighborhood were difficult reminders that the things I experienced as a child here would never be back again and will only survive in my memory. These feelings eventually brought tears to my eyes later that day but I do not regret visiting and peeking back into my past. I greatly enjoyed my childhood and would never give up the memories that I have shared here. Despite the huge changes I found there during our visit, my favorite tree -- the one I would play in -- was still standing, waiting for me, and did not appear to have changed at all. I had the opportunity to re-live a small yet significant part of my childhood...

17 and a half years elapsed.

posted by Michael  # 11/27/2006 09:40:00 PM 4 Comments