August

I suppose that’s that. The streets look the same but without the movement and excess of summer. The kids are gone now. The trash still makes it to the curb, but it’s less cumbersome now. There are no extra cardboard boxes from the new television you bought for your father so his failing eyes could see the Cubs game. No scored and folded boxes that once housed the volleyball net or the snorkel or the bluetooth speaker your daughter had to have because her friends were coming up for a night and they wanted to sleep in the tent in the yard. It’s only quiet now and the weather is nice but everything else is different. We’re not the same as we were last week, to say nothing of how different we were last month.

I remember this time of year thirty years ago with remarkable clarity. My friends were leaving. And the ones that weren’t leaving had already left. It was the end of August of 1996 and the string of summers that I had known and loved had ended. I didn’t yet know that they’d never really return. The streets went quiet and the curbs were clean and my friends were gone. It was just me and an empty office with a piece of paper that said the state deemed my pulse to be sufficient to allow me to work at the game, or perhaps the profession, of real estate. My 1986 Saab 900 was clunking and clicking around corners, but it would have to do. My shirts were from the outlet, my pants pleated, and my shoes were so uncomfortable that one day that fall I ended up with a neuroma in my right foot that still bothers me to this day. I shouldn’t have ran that day, in those shoes on that pavement, but I did. There was no one around to tell me not to.

That fall didn’t go so well for me. I had no business, no friends, and that Saab kept threatening to leave me wherever it had already brought me. I sat in that office for a while every morning, hoping the phone might ring and then quickly wishing it wouldn’t. I still feel that way, so I suppose most things never change. That fall became winter and my friends came home. I saw some of them at Thanksgiving and a few at Christmas. By the next summer there were fewer friends and only a bit more business, and after that summer the start of fall felt the same. Everything went quiet and everyone went somewhere and I just drove down the road to the office. The Saab was laid to rest and a very used Cadillac entered. What sort of 20 year old buys a Cadillac? I wonder that now, I didn’t so much then.

Thirty years is a long time. The same thing. The same place. The same roads and the same signs. The friends are still here but now it’s my kids who aren’t and I miss them every day. I wonder if there will be a time when late August doesn’t feel like the end of something that should have been important. I wonder if someday I won’t feel like everyone left and I’m still here. Or maybe it’ll feel like everyone who left came home and wished they had never had to leave in the first place. I wonder about lots of things but on a Saturday in late August when the lake feels more quiet than it did one week ago I wonder mostly about the same day thirty years ago and I’m now starting to wonder where the years have gone.