I enjoy walking around our city. I think that at one time or another I’ve covered every street within our boarders and some of our neighboring burgs. I started doing this when I was still in high school. Back then, I’d walk at night. Alone with my thoughts and feelings swirling around my mind like Poe’s Maelstrom. In those days I had all of the tensions that come with being no longer child, not quite adult. It’s a wonder that our species has survived, let alone flourished, when such violence rages within the minds of so many of us. Yet, survive and flourish we have.
Now, in my so-called Golden Years I continue to walk the many miles of the city. I don’t go out in the evenings any more. Such has life chosen that those hours be spent trying to unwind and prepare for a long evening’s sleep. Even that can be difficult for those with gimpy prostates. But, that’s another story. When I walk today, especially in those old neighborhoods that I grew up in and around, my mind draws me backward into that age of restless energy. I recall the sights and smells of a much younger and less developed city. When fields and woods stretched out forever. Within those wild lands lay adventures and mystery. We explored them with the stealth that only a child may think is actually ‘stealthy.’ We built forts and brought sandwiches and apples so that we could truly live in those fortresses of cleared ground with ramparts of dead leaves. Such is the world of the very young. Temporary. Transient. A passing vapor.
When I got older I was an aspiring young freak. I played rock-n-roll and hung out with other rock-n-roll wannabes. We laughed. We got high. We made pretty good music. It was always hard for me to have friends. You see, I can be a pretty assy asshole. My assholery in those days was unmitigated by the erosion of age. Sharp-edged assholing can get pretty nasty sometimes. So, for me to have these band-buddies was a wonderful thing. Of course, being an asshole meant that I sometimes pushed the boundaries pretty hard. Fortunately, there was one guy who never put up with my assholing. He, of course, became my best friend and brother from another mother. Eventually, this age past as all do. One day we all found our paths diverging. I saw a light and followed it. My friends, my mates, my best friend chose to let me. And, I chose to leave them.
The reason I’m writing this is that recently, as I’ve walked the streets of the city, old and new, my mind has gone back to those days. The memories of growing warts on our feet in the middle of one street. Of climbing trees and the cliffs along the lake shore. Chasing butterflies and the elusive “Beatles chords” on the guitar. The thoughts flood back into my mind stirring up those old currents that once flowed with power and evidenced the change of life that always follows.
Perhaps this little melancholic trip down that good ol’ Memory Lane was inspired by a poem that a friend shared on social media a short while ago. The poem, “Our Nature,” by Rae Armantrout takes a hard look at the changes that we all wander through. The old photograph seen. The realization that all of that has changed. Disappointment is real. Where did we all go? While the poem doesn’t fit my own thoughts and reflections like my well-worn t-shirts, it does provoke the mind’s searchlight to scan the horizons, the peaks, the valleys trying to see any shadow or vestige of what once was.
All of that to say, I miss you guys. I miss you desperately. I don’t know where you are, save one. I don’t know whether you live still or have walked on, again, save one.
So, to Bruce, Craig, Ted, Dave, Greg, Jeff, and the other Jeff, I love you guys. You’ll always be jammin’ in my heart.