One day, you and your friends went outside to play for the last time…and nobody knew it.
A friend asked me the other day why I write so often about the past—my childhood, baseball, music, school. He wasn’t criticizing. He was genuinely curious.
My friend is very much a forward-looking person. He’s cool with yesterday, but for him, now is good. I totally get it. I sometimes even drive myself nuts with my memories.
And I will never change, because my friend’s right: now is good. But there are versions of life you only get to live once, and that’s kind of a bummer. Unwrapping the plastic on a brand new album and watching it spin on the turntable. Yelling into a fan to hear my robot voice. The radio under the pillow with Ernie Harwell calling a late game. My prom date kissing me in her garage next to the family car—Great chapters in a story I didn’t know would be so short.
Today, I can still find a record store. I can listen to the game on my phone. And every so often, I drive past that house with the familiar garage door. But the kid who lived those moments is gone, and so is the world he lived in.
Sometimes I mourn that.
The other day, I saw five or six bikes lying in the grass. Some kids ditched them and ran to the nearby playground. I caught myself smiling in the rearview mirror. The movie in my head began. Me, John, Dave, Bob, Fred, Mike, and Rob…all together.
We laughed. We picked teams. We argued. We stayed out way past dark and did it all again the next day.
Fade to black.
Funny. The kids who dropped those bikes have no idea how few times they’ll actually do that.
Damn, it goes fast.
