Second Sixteen Just As Sweet

On fading posters and warm memories.

You go away for a while and things change without asking for your input, you know? There’s a maple tree in the front yard of my mom’s house and for most of the time I’ve been alive there has been a hollow in its trunk. Not a Boo Radley hollow where you could store all sorts of treasures and gifts, but a hollow all the same.

In the past few years when I’ve returned home I’ve noticed it getting smaller and smaller, on the occasions when I remembered to look. And last weekend, back home again, I saw that the hollow had disappeared. Sealed off, gone, a memory whose truth will only be known in cross-section on the day the tree finally comes down. With all that time and space it healed itself up completely.

Had I a worse childhood there would be a really juicy metaphor there. As it so happens I had it pretty good. Stepping back into my old bedroom always feels like stepping back into that past, both as a witness to the frozen moment in time when it stopped being the place I spent most of my nights and as an anthropologist of the compressed and layered years where all the people I was between zero and eighteen folded in on themselves. The ceiling is adorned with the same constellation of star stickers it’s had since I was in elementary school, stickers that inexplicably still glow as brightly in the dark as they did when I was learning to read. The upper right drawer of the dresser still holds all my old Boy Scout neckerchief clips and velcro wallets and coins in foreign currencies, all the little gemstones and communion candles and prayer cards, all the noisemakers and firecrackers and birthday cards nestled in a cigar box.

The decorations haven’t changed since I left for college, either, which means that one wall is still adorned with the enormous poster all my friends signed for me at my sixteenth birthday party. It was the only surprise birthday party I ever had; they’d told me we were going to playoff soccer game and so I was dressed in layers of raggedy third-string clothes, assuming no one would see anything except my jacket. Because I didn’t drive and didn’t know directions anywhere they were able to keep this ruse up all the way to a fancy forest lodge, and then convinced me to come in with them while they “grabbed something real quick.” I loved them for it, even though I was hyper-conscious that I looked like shit while everyone else had known to dress for a party.¹

A good litmus test for how long someone has known me is whether they use the -ie on the end of my name.

Today I’m thirty-two, exactly twice as old as I was then. If you had told me at the time that by this age I would still only talk to maybe five people who were in the packed room that night, I doubt I would have believed you, and I’d probably have guessed a few of them wrong. But that’s what getting older means, I suppose. Coming to terms with each new version of yourself, and either making your peace with the new versions of everyone else or letting them drift out of your life on the wind like the golden leaves in autumn. It also means forgetting the petty squabbles and internecine dramas that ruled our lives in those days and being able to look back on those teenage years with fondness, and on those people with warmth. Most of us didn’t keep loving each other the way we promised we always would, but that doesn’t matter. When I need to I can still conjure them up as they were on that chilly evening—before kids, marriages, divorces, overdoses—and bask in how good it felt to be young with them, with our whole lives ahead of us.

Time marches on. The posters yellow, the little treasures lose their meaning, the trophies grow a thicker layer of dust. The wound in the tree finally seals itself off. If you’re lucky you can look back on all that happening and feel content with what it was and where it led you. I’ve been pretty lucky. It’s good to have been here another year.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.

-Chuck

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PPS - I did end up marrying one of the people in attendance that night, which I also wouldn’t have believed at the time. I think what probably lured her in was how “good” and “tan” and “not insane” I looked.

1. This was 2006, so it was mostly just Abercrombie shirts and polos, but still.