After All These Years: Right Where We Left Them

We'd been out riding our bikes through the neighborhood. There could have been some five or six of us or, maybe just the two who lived there. On any given day we might have just returned from the high school where he had been playing football or baseball, or simply skidding our way through the cafeteria area - the concrete there was the best for skids, nice and smooth, and slick. Maybe we'd been at the fort. Perhaps we had been up at one of the corner lots, racing along one of the dirt trails and flying over the low jumps that invariably would get built at such places. We easily could have come back from the TG&Y, having picked up packs of baseball cards, or football cards if the season was right - did ya get any Dodgers? I'll trade you this Reggie Jackson for that Andy Messersmith! It was probably a hot summer day, so we had hurried home, dropped our bikes on the grass in the front yard and run inside to get some cold ice water, Kool-aid or lemonade if mom had made any, and stand under the big vent in the hallway through which the air from the swamp cooler came crashing down over our sweaty shoulders. A few minutes later, there'd be a chorus of thanks mom, and thanks mrs. wagner, as we rushed back out the front door, picked up our bikes where we had left them, and set off to do it all again.

Returning home this morning i saw the above scene across the street; the bikes were different, the girls who rode them not the same as the boys riding roughshod through the old neighborhood, yet the tableau seemed so familiar in many ways. No matter how fast the world seems to be spinning away from us, some things just never change. And that is good.