A story I wish was true and maybe is.

Early release from a business meeting in his old hometown allowed this fellow to drive by the old neighborhood before he boarded a plane to see his wife and child thousands of miles away. Days seemed like years during conferences like this and a chance to remember a part of his youth seemed a good reminder that life existed for him before tedious jobs and adult responsibility.

The older man, but not too old, drove down the familiar street for the second time since he left this town twenty years ago; the first being just moments ago. Ducking his head low and looking out the passenger window of his rental car, he could drive slow and look up the hill at the cul-de-sac where he learned so much about life.

It was not his home that was up there, his childhood home is seen behind him through the rear window, in a cul-de-sac only one hundred yards away. But his friends and his youth was spent in this cul-de-sac he looked at that rolled up a small hill opening into the familiar circle of comfy homes.

Wanting to avoid questioning stares at a slow driver, the older man pulled over and stepped out into the chill. He had parked in front of a house he had been in many times before. A friend had once lived there, now long lost in the mists of growth and maturity.

On the corner he stood and looked up the gentle slope. The landscape was different and a house here and there a different color. The trees were taller. Of course they should be after compared to the thirty year old photograph in his mind. The things that mattered hadn’t changed though. The evening air was crisp and the burnt orange rays of light that the sun only put forth a few months each fall draped its waning colors along the roofs and tips of tall firs.

In his mind he recalled the sound of hitting a ball with an aluminum bat, the ubiquitous ‘tink’ ringing in his ears. He looked down half expecting to feel the vibration of his old bat in his hands. It didn’t matter then how hard he hit the ball, he couldn’t possibly hit a house at ten years old.

The older man lived in that moment in time. The light pole that was always safe in tag. The first tall tree he climbed and all the pitch he had on his hands and clothes afterwards, some sticking to his hair. At some point a mother would lean out a door and yell to one of us that our mom had called and it was time for dinner. It seems so foreign in the present, but when the older man was just a child he could range far and wide without supervision. The streets were safer then and neighbors freely exchanged phone numbers. The older man didn’t know any of his current neighbor’s phone numbers. But there was nothing these cul-de-sac kids could do without being relayed home within moments if needed.

Honesty at the dinner table came from the knowing that the phone tree underground worked faster than tired legs on a dirt bike. The older man remembered a special mom asking her child the usual broad questions, occasionally asking something specific, “Honey, have you seen the box of garbage bags?”

“No mommy.”

After dinner there was still enough light on days just like this for another hour of play. Carefully hiding the box of black garbage bags in his cotton coat, the child would pedal away, wondering how cleaver he had been.

It was unconscious of the older man, but not really that old, to walk back to his car and then just past it to a wide opening between two houses. Through this opening, now as in his youth, stood before him a vast forest which now he realized was just about two acre in size. He could not imagine how many times he trekked into these woods but he stayed with the memory of the garbage bags.

Over the course of many weeks trenches had been dug deep in the woods, winding here and there and varying in depth based on roots and soil composition. The sides of these trenches where braced with scrapes of wood and cardboard which were constantly being re-organized with the falling, jumping and tumbling of boys upon them. The garbage bags, it was decided, would be stretched over the trenches to keep the rain and drizzle away as it is far too common a forecast in a Pacific Northwest autumn.

The trenches were the secondary work of the large pit dug in the summer while looking for buried treasure and dinosaur bones. The pit was far too wide for mere garbage bags so axes and saws stolen from familiar garages brought down branches that were long enough to lie across.

It was impossible to wish but the older man, but not that old, looked up and into the boughs of a large tree. He was surprised to see a mish mash of wood still remained some twenty five feet in the air, the remnants of a long ago treehouse built by young hands. Two his own. Had this fort remained a fixture in the youth of this area for over a generation? Was the story of its creation passed down from child to child until it became an urban legend? Or is it now just an eye sore for those around? How sturdy was the structure after ten thousand nights standing vigil?

He made his way to the base of the still impressive tree. The tree had grown around the planks used to climb its sides as much as the nails still held them in place. Looking now it seemed silly to see a dozen nails doing the work of two. The over exuberance of youth. Climbing was simple and euphoric but the hole in the floor that was once made too big was now not big enough.

The older man, but really not that old now, lifted his head finally into a surprisingly small wood box that at one time was the bow of a boat, a space ship, and a hundred other things among them a couple of open windows to a bigger place in the world. He dare not fit into the fort but time and moisture created a hole at the base of one wall which faced into the west.

The same golden rays of the setting sun shown as clearly and brightly through that small hole as it did through the larger opening above. It must have been ordained that the older man was allowed to see one more sunset from this perch and for several minutes he stared not only into the beginning twilight but into the heyday of his Rockwellian youth.

When the wind became just a bit more chill and the sun had truly set did he realize he had held on to the moment just a bit too long. Like someone who stares into a room after the light has been turned off, wondering if the image was clearly burned in the mind. Climbing down he rested his left foot on the sturdy limb six feet from the ground. The connection of branch to tree was still worn smooth by the feet of those who could climb up no further or who steadied themselves for a breath taking jump to the mossy dirt below. He would not jump this day. He still had the ability and the courage but respected his memories. Some things belonged to childhood.

Walking back to his car, the older man, still young at heart, stopped at the sidewalk to let a small girl and her bigger dog, a husky, pass by; a sign that the neighborhood was still safe enough for that.

He looked to take his next step and stopped. Pressed into the sidewalk directly below his foot is a small handprint. Dropping to his knees he uses his hands to sweep away the light coating of dirt, his tears bringing sharp relief to the outline as well as any falling rain. Two small handprints emerge, one slightly larger than the other. Beneath is written CJ and Sean and the number 1980.

The older man, feeling much older at the moment, stares at the image before him. His hand had been there in the beginning of this place. Putting his older hand over his younger impression, it was not the size that mattered but the time between the rejoining. A long life lived well rubbed back into the concrete. He thought own son’s hand would not be much different than the one he touched now held forever in this pedestrian, man made rock.

One hand dials a cell phone, the other stuck to his younger self in the concrete below. Words not spoken in many years are rushed through sobs and sniffles. Some things time can not change, like the wearing of the wood up in the tree. Some things like the relationship between two brothers can be changed.

You can never go home they say, but when you’re young, you never want to. You want to stay out late with your friends and play games until you can’t see what’s happening in front of your face. Until it’s too cold or too dark or too scary. You stay outside as close as possible to eight o’clock because that means it really time to come home and eat ice cream before going to bed. Moms need time with their children too.

The older man is now forever young at heart and has another phone call to place. He dials his mother and confesses that he knows what happened to a box of missing garbage bags.

She already knew.