Good Times

Good Times

It was a cool night. The wind was smooth, and the air was crisp as an apple, an apple about to turn very very sour. It was a night of remembrance, a night in celebration of the last moments of our youth, the last night before college. As appropriately as our childhood memories are of parks with squirrel infested trees and shocks from playground slides, we would end our childhoods at a local park.

There were four of us: Wakefield, Victor, Al Yen, and me. Wakefield was of a slim build, with the body of an elite cross-country runner and the limbs of a body builder who didn’t eat enough protein. Victor was equally skinny, but with none of the athletic traits that defined Wakefield. Al Yen was of a stocky build, with a head shaped like a boulder, legs shaped like miniature leg shaped tree trunks, and a torso as large as two Victors and twice as tough. We went to a very poorly lit city park, just down the street from a very well lit city park. The shady playground and garbage filled field was a perfect symbol for what we hoped to achieve for the night: absolute nonsense. As we trekked across the field, we slowly spread out across the darkness, covering more ground as individuals than as a group. Each one of us took to a different direction, and after I could no longer sense the others, I closed my eyes and counted. I opened my eyes. They were hidden, and I sought out after them.

I wandered through the park, past the barren baseball field, past the swaying swings, and past the desolate diapers that littered the grass, in search of the others. They did an excellent job hiding. I found absolutely nothing after a full tenth of an hour. Then I heard a shuffle in the distance. I perked my ears in its direction and headed towards the noise slowly and nonchalantly, like a cautious cat. I lurked behind a large light pole, trying to mask my presence from the target. The source of the rustling came out from behind its tree. I peeked out from the light pole. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him, hand in pocket, eyes glimmering, like a cat who has done too many drugs. He was not who I was looking for. But I crept slowly after him, following him from a distance. Perhaps he was a villain, and I could take him down under the cover of darkness like a masked vigilante, becoming a local hero in the process. I followed him to the rust stained bleachers of the baseball field and simultaneously found Wakefield, Victor, and Al Yen hidden there watching the same villain I was tailing. The villain pulled a package from out of his villainous coat, placed it on the steps, and with shifty eyes, walked away in the direction from which he came. What was in the white, powdery, rectangular, plastic wrapped package, I wondered? I and the others had no clue. We decided to find out.

But before we could maneuver our way towards the mysterious package, we were halted by another shuffling noise. This time, it came from a large sack under an adjacent bleacher, which had somehow gone previously unnoticed. The sack on the floor wriggled around as if a homeless person were wrestling with ferrets underneath, but really, it was just an itchy homeless person in a sleeping bag. As a morning flower opens when struck by rays of morning sunlight, the sleeping bag blossomed under the influence of the package, revealing the itchy homeless person underneath, and sending a pungent aroma made from essence of sewer permeating through the damp air and into our nostrils. The homeless person emerged powerfully and ceremoniously walked towards the shroud of shadow containing the mysterious package. He grasped it with his aged and grimy hands and quickly stashed it into his inner coat pocket like a hamster preparing for the winter. With little hurry, he returned to the petals of his sleeping bag. He scratched his itchy self before re-entering the chamber of his slumber and scratching himself some more. The homeless person vanished under the covers of the sleeping bag, and the sleeping bag closed up, as if waiting for the next cycle of nature to occur.

What was in the package? What crazy shenanigans would we have run into if we took the package? As the rusty old clock struck eleven o’clock, and our night was near its end, we witnessed a real world exchange of goods on the last day of our youth. Our childhood bore memories of tossing Frisbees on warm sunny days in parks, and it ended with a welcoming scene into the seedy underbelly of the real world on a cool night, also in a park. Good times.



*NOTE: I don't remember if it was Pika or Victor that was there, but I went with Victor for obvious reasons.