Originally posted 24 March 2009

I was walking back from my friend's house, a path I have walked many, many times, and my old house struck me above the belt but beneath the chin.  I've been by, probably, hundreds of times but this was one of those that sent me sailing backwards.

For just a moment, the sounds and sights and smells of a childhood spent playing on the Big Front Porch (which isn't there any longer) and diving off the Astroturfed deck (and it and the pool are long gone) and when the side porch was our fortress (it was a lot bigger, back then) assailed me.  I found myself pining for that simple time in a more wrenching way than I had experienced in a long time.  My memory is colored and surely as reliable as the analog recording devices of yesteryear, but I seem to remember being so happy, then.

No bills to pay, or even knowledge of them.  No romances except the ones on the silver screen.  Drive-ins and camping out and playing all day long.  That house, that I grew up in, is only a block away.  I can see it from my front yard and, if the wall were not there, I could probably see it from where I am sitting.

I haven't been anywhere, really.

I may well never be.

I think I am okay with that, now.

When a child, I longed for adventure, to be the hero (or the villain), I craved excitement and thrills and spills and chills and only much, much later did I discover that I was far too timid to claim these things for my own.  "If", I said.  "If things had been different..."  "If this one thing could change..."  "If only I had the time..."  I've heard it said that regret is something old men do, sorrow for all those chances never taken.  I must be an old man, then.  Because I regret.

Or perhaps "regret" is the wrong word, for changing anything, the smallest and most insignificant of decisions, could have effects so vast and widespread that one's entire life might be altered in unpredictable, undesirable ways.  I am grateful for where I am, that I am, and I should not change one little thing.

But there are moments, fleeting, ephemeral, that I almost could.  Forsaking all that I now am and sacrificing all that I now have, I could almost trade it all for what might have been or, perhaps, what should have been.  "If I had known then what I know now," so the saying goes, but what?  If I had known then, I couldn't have been, then.  It is inability to see the shape of the Universe that allows us to fail and our failures that enable us to grow.

So we learn, yes?  We learn the ways of the world, as it were, and forget the magic and relinquish the joy and put our hopes and our dreams and our silent wishes into a place from which they may never escape.  We look back, across the long years and through the haze of "knowing better" and are amazed at the sights and the sounds and the smells of a childhood forever lost and always longed for.  We see who we were and wonder without words, "Who is this stranger that I have become?"

Do you think, if you could meet you, decades ago, before life and pain and knowing, that you could tell yourself to watch out?  To hold on?  To be strong?  Do you think if you met you, decades ago, you could even listen to what you were saying to yourself?  Of course you will always be young.  Of course you will never forget.  Of course you'll grip onto the wonder with both hands and never let go.

Whatever you say, old man.  Whatever you say.

I'm gonna go play now, okay?