Mark Scandrette

There was an early March heat wave
the year I turned sixteen
And on my birthday
my friend Erich and I
Built a fire
And took our shirts off
to bath in the sunlight
Along the banks of the Mississippi

From noon to sundown
we were Tom Sawyer and huckleberry Finn
Camping out along the mythic river
The white sand beach
Was bright and warm
and our minds swam
With the hopes and dreams of growing manhood
bathed in the confidence of new found strength,
first loves and an aching search for identity
By the end of the afternoon
We felt the sting of sunburn on uur acne pocked faces, arms and shoulders
as we walked back toward the small house
Where we were still our mothers boys

In four months time I would move away
And we would begin to loose the tender magic of our adolescent friendship:
Our shared secrets,
earnest discoveries and virginal innocence.
Erich would go bald prematurely, become a nurse,
move to Chicago, marry a woman named Lisa,
and complain about Candida infections and New Age conspiracies
I would settle in California– a world away
Where the ties of our kinship, shared geography and religion quickly unraveled—lost in the tangled fragments of a mobile society.

Twenty years later
On this same day
The weather is unseasonably warm again
And my face stings again with the surprising kiss of early spring sunshine
I feel the strength of my youth slowly fading,
But Life still feels mostly brand new,
bursting forth with possibilities
And the Mississippi still flows
swiftly following its course
down past St. Louis to New Orleans,
and out into the gulf of Mexico
and up into the circulating breeze of the moist ocean air that I breath
on this warm March evening.