Cracked Window

I’ve written recently about finding a long-lost friend in an unlikely way, via his son’s photo on a Facebook page. Now comes word that the son — singer, songwriter, and aspiring actor — will soon release his first CD.

His father and I have exchanged emails since making contact in September and pledged to meet at some point soon. His emails took on more vibrancy today when I listened to two of his son’s songs on MySpace. They’re beautiful, conveying range and passion and artistry that remind me of entertainers who achieved stardom.

To my ear, young James’ soaring voice sounds nothing like his father’s, not that I can recall my friend ever singing. There’s certainly no evidence of dad’s touch of Kentucky accent. As I listened, the songs brought to mind — oddly — basketball.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Flying into Orlando last week, I see a familiar sight: Central Florida’s abundant lakes stretching to the horizon. But something is different. No sandy beaches. The lakes are brimming over from Tropical Storm Fay’s deluges. Later I feel the land between the lakes squish beneath my feet. The newspaper where I worked is filled with photos of the St. Johns River spreading far from its banks.

I’ve returned to celebrate my father’s eightieth birthday. One of my most vivid memories of the man swirls past in Saturday’s tropical winds and rains, the outlying bands of Hurricane Gustav sloshing toward the Gulf Coast.

It was 1960, and I was a boy. Hurricane Donna, a monster storm, cut through the Orlando area. My father woke my brothers and me at 2 a.m. to watch the wind tear grapefruit from a tree. The spectacle left us giddy. So did the prospect of school closing. We didn’t anticipate having to work in the yard for three days to clean up Donna’s mess.

In the days before Donna arrived, tropical storms and the typical onslaught of summer thunderstorms had saturated everything. Donna brought epic rains, and the water had nowhere to go. Highways disappeared. Last week, with the sodden overheated air weighing on me, it felt like forty-eight years ago.

Now I’m home in Portland, savoring every breath from cool dry skies. In twelve days, l return to Orlando for a reunion (Winter Park High, class of 1968). More memories await. Happy ones, yes, but tempered with regrets for what’s been lost. As I struggle to recognize friends long unseen, storms with names may be churning our way.