8/31/04
August 31, 2004
From my desk, the most available view outdoors (outdoors being my lifelong refuge) is to gaze over my shoulder through the north windows of our living room. Close at hand are tree leaves—sun-dappled? Is there a breeze?—then a diagonal view across our neighbors’ lawn toward Nineteenth Street. In diminishing perspective are houses and yards, trees and parked vehicles up the next block. I sometimes daydream a full minute or more before any traffic intrudes. Because that landscape often strikes me as banal, hopelessly unchanging, it can seem torturous, as bad as a committee meeting. A rebuke of my insignificant small-town existence.
Today was different.
This evening, as August waned and the day’s light likewise, three young boys flashed through that tableau in maybe three seconds and brightened it immeasurably.
The first piloted a motorized go-cart. Hearing it, I turned in time to see them. His companions cruised immediately behind him on bicycles, each drawn by a short length of slanting white cord tied off on the frame just ahead. They had crested a small grade just before they arrived in view, all three hunched forward, and then bore past the stop sign into the intersection.
I could not describe their clothes or the bikes, I saw them so briefly. How old were they? Young teenagers, I guess, but they may have been only twelve. The caravan skimmed by and disappeared west on Tennessee, a fleeting vision that registered few details.
It was the overall spectacle that stirred my heart—kid-life, in full glory.
Surely what the boys were doing is illegal, unsafe, exceedingly foolhardy. Their parents would likely be horrified at the sight. If there are angels—some such minions in God’s realm must work tirelessly, or how would most of us live to adulthood?—this sort of stunt must give them gray hair.
I’ll bet, however, that far in those boys’ future whole years while vanish from memory, eclipsed by the thrill of their threesome ride through a late summer evening. That memory will endure. Perhaps with less significance than I’ve endowed it with—maybe they’ll remember it as simple pleasure.
Whatever jaded soul coined that insipid business about youth being wasted on the young is someone who never got together with two buddies and tied their bikes to a go-cart. The years to come will be chock-full of times requiring those kids to knuckle down and get real about risk; the day will come, too soon, when such hijinks will be unacceptable.
Meanwhile, let’s quit giving thanks for hackneyed blessings—the freedoms we enjoy in America to blah blah blah—and rejoice for a world where three boys scoot safely through Nineteenth and Tennessee and savor their foolishness for a lifetime to follow.