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Next-door pianos and pudding pops

Even though I saw Kabir in the coffee shop first, we started talking when we boarded the El later, same car. He’s a film student from Croatia making a movie about peoples’ first memories. So we started talking about first memories.

Turns out that my most vivid memories involve the next-door neighbors for some reason, maybe because the edge of their lawn marked the beginning of foreign territory and thus became thrilling enough to remember.

–I was three or four and the neighbors let me use their piano, so I would let myself in their side door and sit in the downstairs rec room alone, plunking out notes and making up stories to accompany the sounds.

–One afternoon my mom asked where the pudding pops were. I told her the truth, I’d given them all away to the big kids mowing the lawn next door. They kept saying how much they liked them.