go pick daddy up at work.
drive through a new place: the bad neighborhood.
good neighborhood. bad neighborhood. big neighborhood. small neighborhoood. orange neighborhood. blue neighborhood. nay. borrr. hood.
you laugh at all the things your mother told you back then.
and you see all the kids on the corner. run across the street to their friends on their corner.
you will never see them again. they will never look like this again. the laughter hooting wildly out of their darkness. their faces look at you as you drive past. curls. braids. two girls holding hands. baby strollers. now you're just inventing things because you can't remember...
everything is gone. the smell in the air. you. you so young.
all times are not the same. they will never feel the same. our generalizations about "life experiences" make us believe this lie. the air was different when your parents were young. and even stranger, even more unfathomable, is the air of our grandparents and our parents' parents, in no small part because movies and television and bad novelists have ruined our appreciation for what was lost.
you're an old fart now. you don't get the kids these days. their music. their clothes. and they're all inside now on the devices you haven't really adapted to because you were on the cusp, you still remember the pre-internet jurassic era.
you remember when the kids hung out on the corner. the big kids. the kids you feared. and the sound in the air, the sound of that insignificant little blip of a generation, crushed under the weight of the babyboomers, but you can still find it today in the electronic catacombs and it makes you ache with loss and nostalgia and all the wonder of being young in a car in a bad neighborhood in 1994...
