The problem with childhood is that we only get one and so much of it goes unnoted. We’re too busy living it, as it should be. If we eat our vegetables and avoid having lunch with a suicide bomber, we might keep our child alive till we are ready for that horizontal goodbye. That’s what longevity is for: to rewrite what might have been.
What’s the big idea?
Why, you want to make something out of it?
Let’s say I disappeared when I was six at the 1939 World’s Fair in the plaza between the Trylon and Perisphere. Holding tight onto my father’s overcoat I looked up and saw it wasn’t my father. So it was, my new family set another chair at their table. Maybe some other kid claimed my designated piece of overcoat and entered my old family. A fair exchange.
On an August Sunday at Rockaway Beach my new parents rented an orange and black umbrella and we found a patch of sand. After digging halfway to China, I ran into the ocean heedless of the drift and riptide. I emerged, stumbling over other’s sandcastles searching futilely for that distinct umbrella among a sea of orange and black umbrellas. Finally, I found myself at the lifeguard station in Far Rockaway, only to be returned to my original family.
It's not a bad thing to vanish every now and then. You get lost, you get found or better yet you find yourself. The muscle of imagination needs the stretch; it’s all part of becoming. As far as I can tell I’m still a work-in-progress looking for both that orange-black umbrella and those threads of a coat.
From my distant perch above I am now my own father wearing a coat of many colors. The umbrellas have dropped me into the commotion of a field wild with ranunculus. Orange, as autumn leaves yet black containing pianistic colors of eighty-eight hues from havoc to hush.
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