A Sudden Summer Memoir
Hey! Bob, remember that time we went out to a golf course in
the middle of the night? Maybe it was out by Spring Valley.
I don’t know what we were thinking. Often we got our “best” ideas after midnight
after being up for twenty hours. You and I weren’t partiers—just arty. Or, our
parents might have said we were harebrained because many of our schemes
followed little to no logic.
The night was damp with dew and our sneakers got soaked
tromping over the hills. We left light footprints trailing us in the short
grass. Stars stuck out like pinpricks against a backdrop of a black velvet sky.
Did we talk? I don’t recall. We were friends, so we didn’t always need to. Or,
you might have been telling me about an art piece you were working on. Or,
maybe I was telling you a story, something I was writing.
Hey Bob! Do you remember cresting a hill? At the top we lay
down on our backs to look up at the stars. We listened to the crickets, to the
sprinklers shushshushing on the putting greens down below, to the sporadic hum
of highway traffic. It was late enough that the bars were closed and still too
early for regular people to wake up and get going. It was like we’d entered a
slip in time.
And then we detected a sound not unlike crickets chirping,
like sprinklers spritzing, like a motor purring— Suddenly a bright headlight was bearing down
on us!
We took off running with a creepy golf cart chasing us. That
was probably forty years ago, and if we had to run like that today we’d be dead.
Sometimes I go back to that damp night and the silence around us and the worlds
we built, letting each other inhabit. Hey Bob, it is a privilege to have been
included.
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| Bob used to run cross country |
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