It's Contagious

I wrote "Love Well" last week, and now I'm thinking about doing, aging, living.

I think this might be what realizing you're middle-aged feels like on the worst days.

They made a statue of us. (Click and listen.)

The kids I grew up with, my parochial school friends, my high school classmates, and my first college roommates and neighbors: we're mostly waiting to graduate in May.

Some of us, I think, have been looking back at the last four years, the last twenty-some years (yes, our whole lives), and wondering how different we could've been.

If we had made relationships work.

If we picked different schools.

If I kept playing basketball.

If I hadn't gone on the stage.

If someone else had picked me up from the airport.

If I hadn't gone to Sonic on a Saturday afternoon last Spring, and if I hadn't missed that last class with Elaine. If Tom had started the car. If grandmothers were always caught when they were falling.

They'll name a city after us and later say it's all our fault.

And if we weren't so jealous. If we cried in our laughter.

If we made different homes, were given different homes.

If I never wrote a poem.

If we couldn't dream about the things we didn't ever do.

How different things would be.

All those ifs...

They've got years of experience.

I fell in love with some music a couple times, and made men's faces the mask of those sounds. It was never really love.

And I made close friends--the best friends-- even the ones that weren't very good at it. And I wonder what it would be like if somebody in an office had thought that I'd fit better in a different room when I was 18 and in a new place.

What wouldn't have happened. The laughter, pictures, car rides, kisses, drinks, tears, poems: the adventure.

The life I wouldn't have had. I think there's a plan. I believe there's a plan, always.

I was meant to unlace my shoes and give Coach my uniform back.

I had to wear that flannel dress with rustled hair on the old LHS stage before the remodel and be kissed by John Proctor--his Elizabeth.

I made enough bad choices to get out of town--a spring break preview of life away from my life, then first to camp on a chance. (The girl had a fear of small boats. These things happen.)

And I learned what summer romance was. It was beautiful for a little while.

Then came Fall and there I went--to university Septembers and Colorado mornings. And it all came together.

And it's contagious.

A year isn't so really so long. You don't realize that when you're young, until somebody tells you. I had no idea until my mom said so at Christmas, but now I think I get it a little bit.

When you're twenty, a year is five percent of your life. When you're eighty, five percent is four years. That's almost as long as I've been out here. In sixty years, college will seem so small, like the years are starting to now.

So a year's not so long. And four of them like this--it sure was something.

We fit life into them.

We're living in a den of thieves, rummaging for answers in the pages.

We're looking for something bigger than the things we've done and the things we didn't do.

Where we are right now isn't just about what lives we've lived or what choices we didn't make, which are really choices we chose not to make.

We're looking for answers of who we've proven ourselves to be and what comes next.

If there will be statues of us.

If the relationships we missed come back around.

If we'll be in these places together later on, or ever.

If we'll remember the road trips and sleepovers and one-liners and movies and mistakes and summers and papers and answers.

If they'll know our names, our legacies. Because we all leave one.

If we'll know what love is outside a song.

If someday all the minutes we spent in each other's lives will begin to make sense. If we'll see why we were brought together in some peculiar combination of Star Wars and basketball and Midwesterners and locals and snowboards and Kahlua and brothers and Boulder and transfers and camouflage. We're a wily bunch. And we wonder if we'll ever understand how lucky we were together inside the plan.

All those ifs...

We're curious, and it's contagious.