Midwest Memo
Familiar
by Alan Shultz

Walking down Delphi's Main Street last Wednesday the sun was scorching from its perch overhead and we pedestrians were moving slowly. Over near the courthouse the set-up for Old Settlers was under way with clatter and pounding and the occasional grunt. Further up the street, underneath a small tent, a woman wearing a modest bonnet sold sweet corn from a wagon.

A hot August afternoon in Delphi is an easy picture to conjure up, something that comes neatly into focus from memory for those of us who know this particular territory. The courthouse, the square around it, familiar facades and familiar textures in shingle and stone and windowpanes, they all hold their place in the today and yet also in the past. There was a certain heaviness in the air on this particular Wednesday and glints of light from the reflection of sun on chrome danced about on a variety of surfaces. It could have been any August afternoon but it wasn't, it was the here and the now, yet it felt as familiar as an afternoon rerun on television.

We made our way down Main Street and then, on a whim, stopped at Dairy Queen and ordered two root beer floats. The lines were long but the wait was worth every second. The vanilla ice cream was cool and the root beer frothy and it too was all so familiar. I thought about all the different places and all the different company and generations with whom I have enjoyed a root beer float. I realize now that I could never come up with a complete list of the root beer floats of my days. The chilled A&Wmug at a drive-in over in Chesterton comes to mind. Has there ever been a better container made for root beer than that ice cold chilled mug? And how can something so seldom encountered these days seem yet, so familiar?

Memorable, familiar. How can a cold ice mug be more memorable than the password for the computer I use everyday? The computer password, no matter how many times used, is all function and no meaning or emotion. I haven't had a cold frosty mug with root beer in a decade but I can conjure up the familiar and memorable of that pleasant experience on command - effortlessly. How can a loved one's face, something that changes with time, remain so familiar regardless of that time?

Change is inevitable. New is intriguing and sometimes new is even better that the old. But the power of familiar cannot be underestimated.

We spent a day at the Indiana Dunes over the weekend. Our souvenir of that day can be found in our shoes, on our carpet, between our toes and even

in our sheets. Sand of course

made the trip back with us from the day at the beach. That familiar gritty feeling of sand between toes and teeth and everything in between, that familiar feeling calls all the way back to my childhood beach days, then fast forwards to our own children and their youthful days spent at water's edge.

The comfort of the familiar connects the dots between stages of life, generations of people and disconnected days. Even with a variety of different contexts things familiar, little and big emit the essence of a path already taken, then taken again, and again.

This summer our lunches have returned to simpler menus of cheese sandwiches with tomato and the occasional peanut butter and jelly. It is the same fare as of picnics past and simpler times with children young and limbs more spry. And munching on these simple repasts does, in fact, invite memory to wander along familiar paths of pleasant days and comfortable ways.

The familiar, the memorable, what nice thoughts to contemplate on a hot August afternoon that feels like so many others.