I remember when I was probably about seven years old, I was thrust into all the activities a son could let down his father in. Try your best. Swimming, soccer, little league. There were probably more things, more sports. A healthy body, a healthy mind. Right? Explain jocks. Rotten minds in ripe bodies, moldy flesh in firm fruit. But not me; school comes first. Absolutely. Keep your grades up. Why only a B+? I'm talking to the teacher for you. Oh, that's so embarrassing, a mother shmoozing up some better grades for you. It's 'cause the school's so small. You can't help but know everyone. You can't help but be in everyone else's business, if only because they speak the same language. And you'd poke fun at their accents as well. You'd run around taunting the lunch lady until she cried. We sure as hell did. Maybe that's why they kept us busy with these sports. And maybe it was some semblance of familiar motions, comfortable movements, choreographed as if we were all at home across the water, where none of us would have known each other. So we'll just pretend, for the sake of it, for the sake of the charade. Were we playing sports? playing parts? And although swim team was the worst, I couldn't quit it for the life of me. I certainly tried, but it was like trying to reverse a dive back onto the starting block, a bootstrapping feat wherein it proved rather impossible to fully extricate myself from the agony. I wanted none of it. Do I totally regret it? Perhaps not. I have broad shoulders, and I suspect I have years of swim team to thank for that. I have recently found I have the shoulders of a medium sized woman, but not the hips. If you squeeze the forms a bit, we'd all resemble each other in a bit. Mold your body into the furnishings for the mind. But I also remember the guitar lessons. I couldn't have been more than, what did I say earlier? seven years old. Signed up for guitar lessons after school. Same building even. Same teachers too, I suspect. Did I know what a guitar was? Only in theory. And I had a realization a day into it: I could quit. So I quit. To what end I have no clue anymore. In fact, I think of all the good it could have done me. And yet I quit, for no other reason, I suspect, than to simply show myself that I could, that I could simply walk out that door and never have to look back. And there is certainly a story in that somewhere, should you look hard enough. A moral? None. Only lessons, once learned, forever clawing at that door to be released. Let me out! I quit! And never look back. Not until you're far enough to safely reminisce nostalgically about your regrets, insulated like a down jacket by the deadened silent feathers of all the years you put between yourself and whatever it is you thought you had quit.
