Year 27

Twenty Seven
In your twenty seventh year you leave Washington, D.C. in the rear view mirror and head back to CA. You spend the summer driving up and down the beautiful feather river canyon. The scenic highway snakes along the thin gorge carved out by the river passing bridges that you stop and take pictures of, past railroad tracks that weave in and out of mountains. It is good to leave D.C. behind for the brown hills of northern CA that guide you down into the Sacramento Valley.
Unfortunately for the first part of your stint in Quincy you lived in a hovel. A hovel is defined as a pretty crappy place to live by three out of the five leading dictionaries. Somehow the foundation of the house had eroded away enough so that spiders could gain ingress into your house with impunity. Unfortunately, the ingress was apparently right above your bed as between the two of you, you killed no less than ten spiders that had crawled in to sleep with you. The cabin was decorated with a moose theme. I believe the motif of brown was picked up upon because brown hides a lot.
You didn’t have a job that summer. Your job was to beat Dark Wizard and relive your eighth grade years. Your job was to visit your family practically every weekend and to go to the gym. It is good that you spent that summer in Chico. You were there to lay your grandmother’s ashes to rest only an hour away from the town where you lived that summer. A place you’d rarely been. You were glad to have been there, to have seen all that sunlight, all those pine trees, and bits of her ashes floating in the wind, against a clear blue sky.
You took this infamous picture.

Thank goodness only you know that this edition of the photo has been edited to crop out your prominent knee braces.

To reward yourself for a busy summer of not working, except at mom’s house

Working at mom's house. This was also the summer that I decided to do a cowboy theme and use words like britches and spurs frequently.

you take a family vacation to Colorado. Sadly, you didn’t have any near death experiences. You saw a lot of beautiful things but nobody ran around with lightning targeting them or stared down buffalo’s. You just kind of threw around horse shoes, played ping pong, and looked at pretty stuff. Life is not about the good times, it’s about the crazy stuff.

Heaven on Earth. Yankee Boy Basin.
Strangely, the thing you remember the most is Yankee Boy Basin, a place that was only accessible by jeep. You passed a massive white glacier, and sat at the edge of a pure waterfall overlooking untouched nature. You’re still five years old wanting to discover dinosaur bones in the side yard. A place like that reminds you that on earth is a piece of heaven. But you can tell, even now, that you’re not doing it justice. And you remember that when you came back down and tried to share the beauty of that place with those who had been unable to go that an argument ensued. The gist of which was explained long ago by Plato.
That winter you travel to Maine. You discover that Maine has lots of lighthouses. You also discover that Maine is ungodly cold and that lighthouses are best viewed on postcards from people you used to know and not in person. When you are done looking at lighthouses you drive around until you can find more lighthouses. You ask to see a place in Maine that has a lighthouse built inside a lighthouse.

Lighthouses are pretty aren't they.

Then you and T stand on some large rocks and watch the grandeur of waves striking shore while your wives yell about “rogue waves.” By the time you’re twenty seven everyone’s wife starts sounding like your mother.

Rogue Wave=instant death/harpies yelling from above.

This is the first year of the rest of your life. You are going to travel more. You are going to use handrails when going up stairs not because your knees hurt but because it’s safer. You’re going to spread ashes and start things like book clubs. You are not going to be ashamed of things like book clubs because you are no longer afraid of being compared to a middle-aged woman. You are still flawed. This is something that will never change no matter how many years pass. You will go to CA and Maine and Colorado. You will pray in Yankee Boy Basin amazed at God’s grandeur and then you will argue when you leave. T.S. Eliot “Till Human Voices Wake us and we Drown.” You will start to get more comfortable with getting older. You’ll think that if you could just get four months away from the world perhaps you’d write a novel. You’ll dig in the dirt in the backyard of your childhood trying to help your mother put back together her garden. You will begin to age more gracefully.