The streets of Gary weren’t as crowded as when I was growing up there in the seventies and eighties. Seemed like the new generations were inside kids as opposed to outside kids like we were. That was a fact. Generation X and Y, as the American media called them, had more internet, television, computer games, and virtual reality addictions than we would have ever stood for in my day. After a while, it was just time to get back to real life, you know, and interact with real people. That’s how I felt while back on the streets. I was back to real life for a change, with street trash and normal people walking around.

I walked past a new neighborhood grocery store on West Avenue and watched a young mother strolling out with groceries that filled the back of her baby carriage. She was wearing all pink from her boots, to her pants, to her T-shirt, and her visor hat.

Then she turned and started walking in my direction. I stared into her baby carriage to see what the baby looked like. The floral colors the baby wore told me that she was a girl. She wore a minihat as well, so I couldn’t confirm anything from the hair. She did wear little gold earrings though. The baby was cute, too, with smallish eyes, round cheeks and her right-hand thumb in her mouth. In fact, I was paying so much attention to the daughter, that I didn’t look back up to the young mother.

All of a sudden, the mother said, “Terrance? Terrance Mitchell?”

I looked up into her face and noticed that she wasn’t so young after all. She looked good though. I guess she looked younger from a distance in her coordinating outfit. But I still couldn’t place her.

I stared into her face as she and her daughter stared into mine. I was trying my hardest to recognize her and to come up with a name, but I couldn’t.

She said, “I’m Theresa, Quinton’s little sister.”

I still didn’t recognize her. I went to high school with Quinton Dixon and hung out on his block as a teen, but I didn’t remember…

“Wait a minute, you had to be like, five, six years old, running around on the porch and the lawn like a tomboy,” I recalled.

She smiled and her face lit up like a Christmas tree. “Yeah, that’s me.”

She was so young at the time, I wondered how she even remembered me.

“You can remember me from that age?” I asked her.

She laughed and said, “No, but Quinton and them would show me your old pictures and stuff and talk about how you look different now in your modeling career, and I would just laugh at them.”

That made sense. I nodded and asked her, “Well, how is Quinton doing?”

She shook her head. “He’s gone, man. He got shot and killed three years ago, right before I got pregnant with my daughter.”