A CHANGE OF FEATHERS

For many people the most significant times of their lives are the last year of kindergarten shading into the first year or two of grammar school, and the last few years of high school followed by the early college years. Chronologically. Those, really, are the formative memories of a social person. Mid single digits, late teens.

In the middle of the night you may remember incidents and people. The comfortable childish socialization of kindergarten was replaced by a different crowd, some of whom were older, taller, and frightening. The need to learn things was impressed upon you, and with luck by the end of that first real school year, some of it would have sunk in. You were charmed by the tale of the two frogs in your first reader -- but what happened to them after multi -syllabic words got introduced, where is the narrative continuity? -- and the ekster being disruptive and adventurous, was a new friend that the authors of those texts sadly neglected in later lessons. Curiosity taunted one.
What happened to the ekster?

An ekster is a magpie, by the way. The illustration was altogether lousy, one would not have recognized it in real life.

By mid to late teens the people around you were different. As were the texts. You were already reading the unapproved stuff, unrecquired, yet never-the-less crucial. Some of your friends were too, and those would be the people whom you would later still want contact with, friendship from.

You remember early grammar school companions, late high school friends, fellow college students.

Maintaining those relationships was a different matter.


Shortly after one o'clock I woke from a long nap with the faces of people from long ago still in my mind. Folks I have not seen in years, and haven't thought about in most of that time. But I appreciate their being there, then.

Another significant time of life is late at night, when you are on the front steps of your building having a smoke. The street is empty at that time, not even a late night drunk stumbling home or insane person voicing off. At the intersection further up the hill a dogowner crosses with his leashed beast, from one street over there's an unrecognizable sound, but otherwise all is still and quiet.

And cold. San Francisco in early August is frigid at night.
In my younger years it was tee-shirt weather then.
Different place, different climate.

Eksters.




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