Friday night

When I was nine I drove up the mountains in the company of a big brother. He wasn't actually my big brother. Let's call him Michael. He had an incredible, retrospectively speaking here, mustache. It was the big brother system where they assign a person to some needy youth. I sort of can't believe this exists in our litigious and scared times. Didn't anyone back then watch the five o'clock news? Nine out of ten people are murderers and drug addicts. It's just math.

The drive took two hours, and I think he kept fiddling with the radio. Perhaps I'd told him that I wanted to listen to a game. I don't really remember. It was a pickup truck with a bench seat in the front, the heater was turned up high enough that I felt sick for a portion of the drive but didn't say anything. The conversation was awkward at best. I wasn't the most gregarious child, so it's tough to blame Michael here.

By the time we reached the snow it was nearly time to go back. We got out of the car for a few minutes, and I remember Michael holding a snow ball. Let's say he threw it a pine, scattering it against it's long suffering trunk. I don't think we threw any snowballs at one another. Rather, we marveled at how cold the snow was in the palm of our hands. I'm just guessing. I've no earthly clue what Michael was thinking, if he had a father of his own that he was trying to emulate, or improve upon, or no father at all. I am older now than that relative stranger who drove me up into the mountains. (I don't mean this to sound creepy or negligent or anything. Times were, in fact, a bit more innocent). And so it's hard to peer backwards through the dust and cobwebs of twenty two years, to brush them aside and remember why we'd gone to see the snow. Perhaps he'd asked me what I'd liked to do, suggested the snow. It was sunny that day, and I remember the jagged streams that ran along the side of the road, cracks in seas of white glass.

No, what I remember most about that day was arriving home in the late afternoon, and my mother asking me where I'd gotten the baseball cards. I told her that Michael had bought them for me at a card shop before we drove up to the snow, and she made me give them back, told him that I wasn't allowed to accept gifts. I don't even remember going to the card show, though at that point in time in my life I was one thousand times more interested in baseball cards than seeing snow. It embarrassed both Michael and I that the cards had to be returned. It was unclear what he'd do with them. I don't think they'd let him sell them back. The strange part is that's the last thing I remember of Michael. Perhaps I saw him a time or two after, but after the baseball cards had been taken away, and we'd not even been able to muster a proper snowball, it was clear that things just weren't going to work out. He went back to being a college student, and I to organizing my baseball cards in meticulous rows by team. Perhaps I was eight.

There was light cloud cover, thin veils over acres of blue sky, and the sun arced down through the snow laden, heavy fingers of trees. I don't know why I remember driving up those serpentine roads one day in late spring. I don't know why I remember many of the things I do.