Shorts and Sneakers

I’ve sorta been revisiting this over the past week or so in my mind since it happened.  It was something that reminded me how disconnected I have become and how a part of me is excruciatingly aware of it now.

The simplicity of touch.

A little over a week ago I was on a business excursion to Falmouth, Mi.   It’s not a bustling town or hamlet… just a small collection of stores in the middle of a farming community.  It does have an absolutely fantastic butcher shop/meat market/ kitch  subterranean coffee shop- L.L Bean dealer.  It was here that  I viewed something that I had since just become so oblivious to that I could almost chalk it up to being forgotten.

As I was waiting for a friend to cash out with his haul of succulent roasted and candied meats I was suddenly passed by a young boy.  Possible 9 or 10…. shorts, sneakers, carefree… you remember them right?   As he slipped past, his right arm extended and found purchase right around of the shoulders of a young girl approximately the same age… shorts and sneakers.

Both of them smiling…shoulder to shoulder like old friends.   I heard something being said about ” My grandma is waiting” before they lock stepped away in some sort of “Hey Hey, we are the monkeys” theme song tribute.   At that moment emotions suddenly flooded into my conscious mind about how innocent that interaction was.   How , even being on the cusp of such a crazy time in a young persons life, that they were in the moment where an arm around a friend was just that.  The sharing of an unspoken intimacy because there was no endgame.  No predilection.   Just the experience of youth.  It made me extremely melancholy for a few seconds— for in those moments I was flooded with the memories of a different me… the younger me… shorts and sneakers.

That experience lit a fire under my ass to go home and write.  But I didn’t.   I ,instead ,let those feelings distill in my psyche for awhile.  I began to think about my own personal experience with the act of touch.   I had to asked myself when was the last time I experienced someone placing a hand on my skin.  How uncomfortable I was with it.   How I felt extremely disconnected from the act.  I also had to ask myself when the act of touch was only associated with another act…and how now…and for years I had fused the two together as one.   I know I’m not alone in that.  The raging hormones of the teenage years slowly changing that viewpoint into a chariot for my libido.   Touch was lost and replaced with the seedy lounge singer called Lust.  But that is another story and I think it betrays the essence of this diatribe by going off on that tangent.

I think in that moment when I saw these two youngsters that this 43 year old me became…for the instant…jealous.   Jealous of the beauty of innocence.   Now I could be mistaken…my interpretation of what was going on as seen through the prism  of my subconsciousness need for human connection… but I would rather think of it as my realization of the purity of the moment, and that they unknowingly took it for granted as normality.  It made me realize  that I am not this fractured person that has totally closed himself off , comfortably residing in his own darkness…but a man that has cracks in an armor that protects the softest parts.   I would like to think it’s much akin to  Leonard Cohen’s prophetic chorus…..” There are cracks in everything…thats how the light gets in”….for a fleeting moment I saw a little light between those two… shorts and sneakers.