I have a son who’s now your age,
which must be why I keep thinking of us,
best friends at seventeen,
twenty plus years ago.
Of course you’ll always be seventeen.
Senior year I was seeing Julie.
If I hadn’t been with her that night
I would have been in that car with you.
I don’t remember the name of that
girl you were seeing.
I remember her crying though.
I do remember that.
I remember that when my father took the call
and broke the news to me that night,
he held me.
Tighter than I can ever remember.
To comfort me, is what I had thought.
‘You gotta laugh’ was your mantra.
I don’t know where you picked that up from
but you said it to me all the time.
You’d say it to me in the principal’s office,
and you’d say it to me in detention after school.
We never cared much for the rules,
but we did like to laugh.
You gotta laugh.
Summertime we’d sleep out in the
field behind your house.
Make a fire, and swipe a watermelon
from Markey’s farm.
We’d look up at the stars and talk
until early morning,
about girls, about school, about life,
about the things we were going to do.
We were seventeen.
What could stop us?
You applied to West Point.
None of us knew about that until afterward.
You were going to surprise everybody
after you got accepted.
Typical kind of thing for you to do.
So now I have a son your age.
How about that?
And he makes me think of you.
And friendship, and laughter.
And life.
Fleeting, fragile, precious life.
And I have come to understand
why my father held me
so tight that night,
twenty plus years ago.
Tighter than I can ever remember.
Now I understand
why he held me like that.
.