I Still Dream About You

Prologue

IT’S FUNNY WHAT A PERSON WILL REMEMBER SO MANY YEARS LATER; what sticks in your mind and what doesn’t. Whenever he thought back to the year he had worked at the Western Union office, he remembered that little girl.

At the time, the entire city of Birmingham was surrounded by a number of smaller suburban neighborhoods, each with its own name and shopping area. Most had two or three churches, a drugstore, a grammar school and high school, a bank, a Masonic hall, a J. C. Penney’s, and a movie theater.

In East Lake, where he worked, the Dreamland Theatre sat directly across the street from the Western Union office, between the barbershop and the grocery store. He had been sitting at his desk, looking out the window, when he had noticed the pretty brown-haired girl in a green plaid dress. She was the tallest of the three or four little girls walking home from school together that afternoon. It wasn’t an unusual sight to see groups of kids going by that time of day. He was used to that, but just as they passed the barbershop, the tall girl stopped in front of the theater, waved goodbye to her friends, then turned and walked inside the two big glass doors and disappeared into the lobby.

Dreamland didn’t open until seven P.M. on weeknights, and he wondered what she was doing going into an empty movie theater all by herself. He even thought about walking across the street to check on her, but a few minutes later, a light came on in a second-floor window, next to the big neon sign, and he could see the silhouettes of a woman and the girl walking back and forth, so he assumed she must belong there.

But still, every afternoon after that, when he wasn’t busy, he would look over to make sure she’d made it home safely, and eventually, right before she went inside, she would turn and shyly wave at him, and he would wave back.

About three months later, he was shipped off to serve in the army, and by the time he got back to the Western Union office, the theater had closed down for good, and he never saw her again.

He had six granddaughters of his own now, but to this day, he still wondered what ever happened to the pretty little girl who had lived upstairs in Dreamland.