Post 7 Exhilaration and Youth, Both Fleeting

“We are fucked,” whispered Chris. His face took on a strange and sober look.

“Maybe not. Stay still. Don’t talk. Arnie, not a fuckin’ word. Got it?” Spence strained against the dark to see any signs of adult movement. Remarkably, Arnie treaded water silently and without effort. The rest of us knelt on the warm dock, listening for any sound that betrayed discovery.

Minutes passed that seemed exponentially longer. Spence seemed satisfied. “I think we’re ok. Let’s get back to the car.”

We all turned to dress, only to find Spence’s dad in his boxer shorts, holding our clothes.            

“Looking for these?” Mr. Cole was smoking a cigarette and looking displeased. “It’s after three. Arnie, I believe I recognized your signature whoop. Chris, what’s wrong with you? And Drew, you’re supposed to the responsible one of this bunch. Jesus. And you,” he said looking directly at his son, “we’ll talk in the morning.”

He shook his head, took a drag of his cigarette, and tossed our clothes on the dock. “Who’s driving?”

         “Me, sir.” Chris was fumbling with his shorts.

          “Can you get these idiots home safely, or do I need to call all your parents to come and get you?”

            “No, no need to do that. I’m ok to drive. Really.” Even standing with his pants around his ankles and fiddling with his shirt, Chris did seem remarkably sober.

            Mr. Cole turned and the reflected moonlight off the lake caught his face. Suppressing a smile, he turned to us as we struggled with sleeves and buttons and shoelaces. “You know, you shouldn’t be out doing this, right?” He bent and retrieved a beer bottle from the edge of the dock and took a long drink to finish it. “Or this, right? And while we’re at it,” gesturing, he took a long drag from his cigarette and dropped it in the empty bottle, “or this either.”

            “We weren’t smoking—” Spence started.

            “Kiddo, I can smell it on your clothes.”

            “Oh.” Spence sighed.

            Mr. Cole, seemingly convinced Chris was able to navigate the Buick, shooed us in the direction of the waiting car. He and Spence padded barefoot around the edge of the lake toward their dock and up the path to their house. I’d never noticed before that, at some point over the past winter, Spence had grown taller than his dad.

We all sat on the dock in silence, shivering now as the morning cool sank in. Spence and his father became two dark, less-defined figures as they approached the house overlooking the lake.

Feeling it was once again safe to move, with a minimum of sound we returned to the Buick. Chris brought it to life and eased out of the cul-de-sac. Arnie and I turned for a last look and saw the light across the lake go dark. After a long pause, the light at Coles’ died, too. In three hours, the sun would be up. In six, we all would face swim practice and the familiar shock of cold, chlorinated water.

*

I will my body to sit up, to no avail. The big toe on my right foot itches, but there is no way to ask anyone to scratch it. The dream is unsettling.

Now, I am seventy-two again.

John, all the time we spend worrying about getting old, comparing our old selves to our young selves. What a waste. Laying here, how inconsequential it seems.  A fifty-year-old memory brings home a simple understanding: old is a wistful state of mind. Sure, aging usually brings with it varying degrees of physical decline, like frustrating eyesight, achy shoulders, or hands that fail to grip. Uninterrupted sleep becomes only a memory, as your body coaxes you up to pee once, twice, maybe more on a frustrating night.

But the emotional wear and tear of getting older feels more like a product of comparison than actual decline. I can only feel the emotional pangs of getting old when, by contrast, I can recall the exquisite feeling of being young. We were only seventeen that summer. Not adults. At least not yet.

                             *                                 

The dream took a detour away from the Buick, the lake and 1972. In a remarkable fast-forward vision on the wide-screen in my head I watched events of the past unfolding with amazing clarity: Spence, Chris, Arnie, and I splintered off from our hometown and pursued university and new tribal allegiances: fraternity rush, initiations and secret rituals, football tailgates, road trips to nearby women’s colleges, spring break skiing in Canada, and sunning in Florida. Along with a varying commitment to classes, these activities were an important part of the experience that was, by degrees and by happenstance, hurtling us toward manhood and the eventual realities of adult existence.

  But, for me, the summer of ’72 delineated the beginning of the end of my childhood. I, far more naïve than the others, would continue to strive to fit in, to become more knowing, and to hold close a secret I didn’t want to acknowledge and worked hard to conceal from those who thought they knew me.

We would continue that summer, and during those that followed, to try on other adult behaviors guided only by the questionable judgment of adolescent minds.Those choices and circumstance would put distance between us. Spence became a decorated Marine, married a beautiful girl, and raised two boys of his own. We lost track of Chris after he failed out of his second year at Dartmouth and headed for Canada to avoid being drafted into a war that none of us understood. Spence offered to smuggle Chris across the border at Windsor, Canada in the trunk of his car, a plan that was wisely abandoned.

Arnie, shocked his parents by not only applying to Baylor but by getting accepted. After discovering that pot was far preferable to being lectured, Arnie lasted one calamitous semester. He dropped out and continued to make unconventional choices that exasperated his parents and put further distance between him and me.

I, the generally play-it-safe boy, and he, the mule-headed guy grew further apart. I was concerned—even fearful—of what other people thought of me. He appeared not to care, showing disdain for what anyone else thought of him. It looked so easy, and preferable from the distant vantage point I had of his life.

  I last saw Arnie at our twentieth high school reunion. In a sea of coats and ties, he wore his signature jeans and a well-pressed t-shirt. He had done well in building management and made a life with a beautiful woman five years his senior. Contrary to my uncharitable predictions, Arnie became a family man. A good father and husband. He created what he found to be a very satisfying life. 

I went on to spend twenty-five years in advertising and branding, promoting everything from laundry detergent to banks to SUVs. During those years, I recognized, recoiled from, and finally embraced my long-suppressed attraction to men, ending up married to a great guy who heard these stories of my youth more times than he’d care to.

After a later-life stint in graduate school, I spent another twenty years as a psychotherapist, helping other people recognize and celebrate their good choices and cope with the fallout of their bad ones. I’d like to think that some of my early experiences helped inform what now passes for better judgment and mostly better choices.

It seemed somehow odd, but not necessarily sad, that I would be the first of us to die.

            Some nights, before the accident, in that search for sleep and the solace of dreams, I often wondered if Spence, Chris, and Arnie ever drifted back to that summer. And I wondered if, for a few moments, they ever felt the delicious satisfaction of being old, having lived and earned the memory of those warm summer nights and the fleeting exhilaration of being all of seventeen.