Cracked Window

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.

In late August I was three thousand miles from my Portland home, back in the Orlando area where I grew up, left, and returned to work for seventeen years.

My wife and I were enjoying a notable meal at a new restaurant in Winter Park, The Ravenous Pig. I heard a familiar voice at a nearby table but didn’t turn around. Suzame confirmed it was a personable guy I fired years ago from the newspaper, the Orlando Sentinel.

What will the boy remember of yesterday? Years hence, is Atticus, my son of three, doomed to never recall his first day at the new edge of his known world, the Pacific Coast?

As I watched him run toward and away from tiny advancing and retreating waves, I realized how fleeting the moment probably was. Not just his memory of what he did but the pure delight of not caring about anything else. Neither the event or the feeling might ever return.

I’m living vicariously through two high school friends since spending time with them last week in Florida. Charlie and Danny are civilian pilots who fly extraordinary jets, sometimes to exotic and far-flung places.

We had less ambitious expeditions in school, including one I’ve written about before. And on Friday, Charlie and I reminisced during a drive to New Smyrna Beach how he and I would intentionally get lost in my dad’s 1962 MGA sports car simply for the hell of it.

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.

A name, “Huff,” is sewn on his backpack. The backpack is made of camouflage cloth. So is his Army uniform. I’m standing behind the young man. We’re stuck in an airline aisle, inching toward our seats.

“Headed to I-raq,” he says when another passenger asks. The soldier’s tone is flat, inflection free, practiced.