Out the Door After Breakfast
A five-part series about being young, carefree and convinced it would last forever.
- 02 — The Dock
- 03 — The Week the Rain Fell Sideways
- 04 — August, and the First Empty Chair
- 05 — The Last Day at the Dock
The morning had one instruction in it, and the instruction was: go.
You ate something standing up. You found a shoe. Somebody older said be back for dinner, and that was the entire schedule — the only fixed point in a day that otherwise had no contents at all.
What we had instead of plans was a route. Down the driveway, left at the house with the aggressive hedge, past the place where the sidewalk had heaved up over a root and every bike in the neighborhood knew to lift its front wheel. You did not knock on doors so much as ride slowly past them until somebody came out.
There was a currency and it was time. Nobody had money. Somebody occasionally had a dollar, and a dollar was a committee decision.
The rules were unwritten and absolutely binding. You did not go past the highway. You did not ring the bell at the house with the dog. If you got hurt, you decided in about four seconds whether it was the kind of hurt you could tell an adult about, because telling meant the day was over.
Boredom was part of it, and this is the part that gets edited out of the remembering. Long flat stretches of nothing, sitting on a curb with the tar going soft, arguing about something none of us cared about. We were bored constantly. Boredom was the raw material; you had to build the day out of it yourself, and some days you built nothing.
The whole arrangement rested on one sentence: be home when the streetlights come on. Not a time. A condition. You learned to read the sky the way you learn a language, and you learned that the last twenty minutes before the lights came on were the best twenty minutes there were, because they were borrowed.
Somebody's mother would appear at a screen door and say a name in a particular register, and that was the end of it, and the day dissolved without ceremony.
None of us thought about the lake yet. The lake was later in the summer, when it got hot enough to be worth the ride, and it had its own government and its own laws, one of which involved a rock nobody could see.
“The whole arrangement rested on one sentence: be home when the streetlights come on.”
Otherwise Ordinary publishes original fiction and invented reporting. Names, places and businesses in this piece are made up.
