I don’t know why I was running. Maybe I needed to get ‘home free’. Back to ‘base’. Maybe part of Hide n Seek. It was part of some game, and it was dark out. When I was a kid, I thought I was a fast runner (doubtful), and that thought was in my head as I ran down the sidewalk. I can remember that precise thought and I can still envision the cracks in the sidewalk, right under the street light. I could find the exact spot today. I don’t think it was the crack in the sidewalk that tripped me up. I think it’s that my upper body was feeling so very confident, it was pulling me faster than my legs could go. In any case, I fell (went flying) down and slid along the sidewalk, like a runner slides into home plate. But this wasn’t a baseball game, and my legs were wearing shorts and sliding along concrete, not the sandy dirt they use to line a baseball diamond. Yeah, my legs got all scratched up, bleeding, a big bloody mess, etc., and it was the end of the evening’s fun for me.
A lifetime ago, since I had that fall, and I think today about summer knees, and how bad my knees are nowadays. Maybe it’s the contrast and the awareness of my current shortcomings that made me write. Things wear out. Knees wear out. But that night, I was so confident I was a great runner, right up to the moment I realized I would, for sure, hit the pavement.
Maybe this one’s a salute to who we were as kids, to the confidence, to the knees, we had as kids. Yeah, on a warm summer’s night, many nights ago.
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On a warm summer’s evening … simple words … my favorite kind of words … packed with age-old nuance and memories.
Credit: The Gambler, performed by Kenny Rogers (1978), written by Don Schlitz.
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etikser 