Spring

This one's for you, Elizabeth.

I got to leave work early today since it’s Good Friday, and as soon as I got home, I went out to sit on my porch swing with a beer. It seems like spring is here, and I’m happy to see it. It's a beautiful day – warm, sunny, but with a cool breeze, just the kind of day that brings back old memories. I always think about being a kid again whenever spring and summer approach, and today, those memories feel really good. I remember the warm patio under my dirty feet; riding my bike in my grandmother’s neighborhood, and hanging out with the kids who lived nearby; my best friend from high school working the concession stands at the city park, and eating corn dogs while kids played Little League games; riding around in my friends’ cars, listening to music from CD Walkmans, when we were lucky enough to have one with a good set of batteries; the seemingly endless fireflies in the bottom below my parents’ house, and a clear view of the stars. And nothing but tomorrows ahead.

I relish that sense of easy, untroubled freedom, and I do my best to find it when the first steady run of warm days kicks in. I’m so glad that it’s still there, just beneath the surface, and I don’t think I will lose it anytime soon. Still, I have a lot to think about, as always, I guess. We’re jammed in the middle of a bloody, useless, meaningless war, a protest to which I might join tomorrow. We’re bestridden by increasing economic failures, the effects of which threaten to push us into recession or even depression. We’re strangled by the cruel illusion of inexorable separation from the everyday strangers surrounding us, by the half-intended, half-believed prejudices of those who seek to push us apart for their own gain. All of these thoughts remain in the back of mind, and all of them will surface again. But I'm not sure I could deal with them without simple pleasures like spring nostalgia; these memories and all our other everyday humanities give us the desire and the ability to face our future. I never want to grow up. It doesn’t mean at all the same thing to me as it does to everyone else.

So, I’ll post this entry, and go back to the porch until sundown. I don’t think I will see any fireflies yet, but I will nevertheless take comfort in faint, twenty-year-old ghosts of them.