when i wast around

Sometime the mind goes back to many years ago and people and places crop up suddenly.It happened by chance.My mother and I were in a discussion about visiting some friends and family.Me proposing the idea and my mother resisting with all her might(she hates going out).
It got me thinking and throwing my mind back a few years(a good number of years actually).I remember a line of friends who lived on spur tank road and Harrington road.I remember visiting friends with my mother in Kilpauk.Most of my memories are of holding my mothers hand and tagging alone by bus or walking around to visit.It was a regular occurrence and not something she disliked.With my father away at work and the two older kids in school,my mother and I started our visits.I think there was a timetable to the visits.In most houses there were no children my age so I was always well fed by the friends(that was the highlight of my visits)and allowed to sit and listen to them chatter away.I never understood half of what they said but they all lived in quaint houses with some garden or trees so i was allowed to climb trees or play by myself for hours until it was time to go back home.I remember on house where I was always served tea if in bright yellow cup and saucer.I felt very grown up and smart drinking from that cup.Now i remember that the only reason she allowed me to drink from it was that it was plastic and my baby hands couldn't do much harm.
I remember the great lunches at my aunts place and the other friend who was a great source of amusement for my mother and her other friends because she gave her kids bread for breakfast.I can figure out why this was such a source of mirth but in those days I believe serving bread was a sign of a lazy mother.
Why did a woman who did so much visiting now dislike the idea of stepping out of the house.I tried to put a fix on it and it probably started around the time that my father retired.Suddenly he was always there and there was no time to visit.Funnily enough all the men of those household retired around the same time and suddenly the woman were not visiting.That was it,no more visits and then we all lost touch.Yesterday when I reminded my mother about these people I discovered that they had all been neighbours at some time or the other when my parents first came to madras and then they became friends.I realised that I my memories started only from the time I was born and that some ten or twelve years before that my parents had a life I know nothing about.They stayed in all kinds of places around the city and sometimes the suburbs,my sisters went to different schools until they joined the one I went to.There was a life I want to discover but no one wants to talk about it.Not my sisters nor my mother so I guess I will have to keep asking questions.Will I also stop visiting,will I also become the hermit that my mother has become.Scary thought but perhaps in the fullness of time I shall go the way of my mother....I wonder.