Cracked Window

People in their fifties sometimes long to be in their early twenties again. Now that’s a revelation. But do I want to wake up to remnants of this post-midnight snack on my night table: beer and chocolate ice cream?

My chef-in-training nephew, living with our family for a time, might have been testing the palate’s response to the hops-chocolate combination. That wouldn’t explain why this morning I found the ice cream carton and its melted contents in the refrigerator instead of the freezer.

I have a high school friend named Jim. I haven’t seen him in nearly four decades. In fact, none of our other friends have seen him in years. This protracted absence gives Jim a leg up on the rest of us: he’s frozen in our minds as he was back then, young and good-natured and athletic.

People have a way of drifting off after high school and college, not by design, but more like dandelion seeds on a puff of wind. We end up where we do, looking forward and not back. At least until the weight of so many passing years reverses everything, and we try to put the flower back together.

A few years ago I wrote a lousy short story. The main character, based loosely on me, carried a burden of regret for wrongs committed in his youth. Although decades had passed, he decided to make amends and began a quest for redemption.

Yes, the premise was cliched. But I was writing based on personal experience, and this public acknowledgment of sins felt good, though fiction absolves no guilt.

Dawn has passed without sleep, and I’m headed back to Portland, crammed into a jetliner thigh-to-thigh with strangers. But I’m elsewhere, drifting through another world, a planet of the previous three days and nights in Central Florida.

With me in this world are dearest friends, friends I’d lost for an unspeakable number of years. The occasion, at least on the surface, is my forty-year high school reunion, which conjures up a stereotypical image of social gatherings not conducive to meaningful conversations.

The rumors sweeping the Internet are true: I’ve been working out. On my own and with a trainer. Working out a lot.

The motivations are the usual mix of superficial short-term and serious long-term desires. Top of mind is looking good for my forty-year high school reunion next week. So is losing weight I gained this winter after losing it last summer, wanting to fit into something sold on the same rack as skinny young hipster jeans, increased stamina, shocking my doctor by hitting a seemingly unreachable weight goal. I could go on.

In the examining room, I waited for the dermatologist. Framed on the wall was an information sheet about melanoma.

The doctor entered. Tall, thin, and past retirement age, he shook my hand as one would expect an ex-Marine to shake it.

It took more than a half-century, but I finally learned why we ended up living on a lake in Central Florida during my childhood. Not one house but three as we moved clockwise around Lake Sybelia in Maitland from the late 1950s to 1970.