It’s quiet now and cool.  The breeze coming in.  I remember sleeping in the little room in the back of the house on Utah Place, Mary Beth and I in our twin beds; the rest of the kids spread out somewhere; Sue right above us;  the boys in the large room adjacent; the rooms were connected with a secret passageway and as kids we would crawl in one room and end up in Sue’s closet.  The porch off the back bedroom overlooked the backyard, where Dad grew tomatoes and cucumbers and lettuce in summer months.  Dad admonished  That porch is going to fall down! but we never listened, our bare legs swinging over the ledge, listening to the summer dark.  Years later Mary Kreiner said she remembered drinking beer out there when we were in high school, but I don’t remember that at all. That’s how memory works.  You have it and it fades or else it doesn’t.  I do remember getting sick in the bushes bordering Carpenter Branch Library from a long slow night of red sloe gin.  High school.  A long time away from here.

Sometimes I think it would be better to go through life drunk or stoned on something to make you forget, but then I have to ask: What am I trying to forget and why?  I remember floating on a rooftop in New York City, the lights glittering in front of me in the inky black, so high my lips were numb, my teeth tingled.  Looking out into the New York City night sky, lights like fireflies: Anything was possible.