Jeffrey is, first, my brother Peter’s friend. From high school.

After Peter moved here at seventeen, having graduated from high school a semester early, Jeffrey would pilgrimage to Cambridge to visit, and that’s when he met Dan. Let’s say 1970 to maybe 1973.

The most memorable time we had together (from my view) was our trip to Popham Beach, a then little-known area with a tiny island you swam to. Unless it was low tide, in which case you walked across the wet sand. We’d arrive late afternoon, wait for the tide to shift, carry our goods to the island, set up a makeshift camp and watch the water seal us off.

In those days Dan guarded our low tide domain from intruding strangers by standing Gryphon-like on the exposed rocks – buck naked. Stoned, naked or not, he was also the only one of us who’d already sired child, been married, and divorced, and secured a real job.

Jeffrey’s visits dwindled, Peter left, our lives acquired the quiet desperation of a Fellini film, and many, many years passed until one day Dan and Jeffrey met again, here in Acton in my kitchen.

Dan walked in and saw someone he almost recognized sitting at our dinner table. Jeff looked up and saw a guy who’d worked at Raytheon, owned a laundry van, lived on Richdale Ave. with Peter, had two sons (many people still aren’t aware of that), been divorced twice, and on and on.

Which brings me to Jeff’s memory. As I see it. Each time I drop in on my parents, and stay at his and Karen’s house, I hear new and exciting things about my own past, or I’m presented with trivia from my present. “Doesn’t your brother-in-law have the same truck you have?” Now why would he know that, much less remember it? Near the end of my last visit I began calling him something like Brain Boy, Or Super Nova Memory. I’ve forgotten.

But even the mighty are made of flesh and blood. A couple nights before the end of my last visit, we had this conversation.

“What did you do today?” Jeff asks.

“I shopped at Schnucks for food, I drove to Barnes and Noble and bought another radio CD, and I stop ped by Fifth Third Bank to check on my parent’s safety deposit box. But the bank was closed.”

“You mean First Federal?”

“The one across from Wesselman’s near Turoni’s Pizza?”

“Turoni’s is not there, it’s over near … oh, yeah that is a Turoni’s. But it used to be called … ”

And then I saw it. For the very first time. That desperate, searching, memory-passing-before-my-eyes look. Jeffrey froze for two and half beats – not long for me, but a lifetime for him.

“It was called … the Forget Me Not Inn.”