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When I am lonely I call, and from somewhere deep in the recesses of my memory, Richard appears; still ten years old and filled with a courage that I have not witnessed again in fifty years. He dares me to return...tempts me with his tales of grandeur...lures me back with promises of thrills unfulfilled...and then, breaks my heart again. He takes me back to the endless summer of my youth. Long days spent on my back watching clouds shape over the horizon. The smell of dust and grass. Hot nights, waiting for the curtains to breathe and bring some reprieve to the stifling tomb of my room. And mourning. Memory, the makings of me. I’m old enough now to be thankful for it. It is a place where even those departed still walk and laugh and live. It is the place of my youth. It is here that I find him. My life continued after Richard’s death, catapulting toward the middle years. And, though he remains ten, I can imagine his face at fifty...at twenty...at seventeen. I feel he should be with me as I wrestle the demons of declining health, and then I realize... he is. The summer night sticks to my body, my drink sweats through the glass tumbler. I hear him beckon. I close my eyes and am greeted by his toothy grin. His expression doesn’t change as I study him through my sixty-year-old eyes...somehow he only sees the boy within. He urges me to follow. I trip on familiar steps through the orchard and down to the stream behind his house. Suddenly we are planning our ninth birthday. Born a mere three weeks apart gave us reason for a secret birthday celebration, private and apart from the parties our parents hosted. We would spend days planning our coming of age...our steps into the next year, always marking the progression with some act of defiance. I watch a devil dance in his smile as he pulls a Players Plain from his T-shirt pocket. “This,” he says, “will be the initiation into our tenth year." |