One Clear Christmas Eve

     I've lived through many of them by now, way too many to recall.  But the mind works in mysterious ways, and memory even stranger.  Thousands upon thousands of days are not even a blurred memory, but are lost in time, as if they did not even happen.   But for some reason, there are memories that appear as scenes, complete with the inclusion of the sounds and thoughts as the moment of memory is drawn forth.  One such is a Christmas Eve.
      We are walking home from Midnight Mass back in the time when the Mass was actually at midnight.  Dorothy and Sandy and I are walking down the center of the road, on Main Street as it was known then.  State Street may have been the official name, stashed away in some stuffy old historical document  somewhere, but everybody called it Main Street.  Our parents had ridden home in the car, but we three had chosen to walk. The night was clear and maybe cold, but we are clad in our winter coats and hats and gloves, so the weather is no concern of ours. All the cars have left the church, so the open road is all ours. Our boots crunch the snow of Main Street.  Our minds are unfettered with problems of any type; our parents still bear the burden on that front; we are as yet untouched by romantic heartbreak, the regret of missed opportunity, the loss of loved ones, and we are on school vacation for the holidays.  All is calm. All is bright.  We walk and talk and laugh with the ease of waning childhood, feeling a little awed to be in the center of the road in the middle of the night, in our town, with no one else around.  The streetlights are contributing only slightly to the brightness of the night  and as we make our way toward home, we sense that the night is special, with the promise of tomorrow, yet so ordinary----with the unspoken feeling that if we could only  keep walking we might come upon something rare and wonderful.    But the road does end, and our moment  of immortality,  or whatever it was, ends with it.