Dirty Fingernails

  

My favorite part of the day is when nothing happens.  It's that weird in-between space, when the LogOff buttons get pressed on a lot of work-related tech, and somehow people start to breathe more deeply.  It's when the old back yawns and people remember that they can walk, they can stand, and they can hula hoop for as long as they'd like.  A small giddiness starts to rise inside of me, as if the world is starting over again.  Excitement at the endless possibilities that wait their birth even as the Sun is setting. 

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About a month ago, I sat down with an old fountain pen and attempted to write my name out in cursive.  I say attempted, because my s's certainly fell flat on their promise, and as I encroached the space between those two words, my wrist was reminding me how out of practice it was.  The experience brought me back to a fleeting reality that becomes more pressing over time.  The moment, or moments, I should say, that define a generation's understanding of growing up.  The stress of adulthood 'stuff' and an increasingly pharmaceutically-altered existence has certainly rendered some of these memories mere flash shots of time. However, anyone from around these parts and growing up within the same era as I did would probably be able to recall the smell of a well-used volleyball or the whiplash from their first sled maneuver on the hill.  Those visceral experiences tend to mark us more, whether we recall every detail accurately or not, and we do carry some of them with us to the grave.  I sometimes wonder if a part of us, unconsciously, holds on to a specific detail, or second, within those experiences in order to learn from them, even if the lessons comes to call decades later, and to further our quest to understand who and what we are within this world.