For Auld Lang Syne

So there I was this morning, talking with a very old friend - dare I say brother of a different mother.

It had been ages since we spoke face-to-face, or should I say Skype-to-Skype.  Years of email and the occasional phone call.

We go back to age 7.  We were altar boys together.  His mother was active in my father's campaigns.  We went to school together through high school.  We spent our weekends together.  He was always cutting edge with the latest music and got me into Alice Cooper and Elton John.  We have always been brutally honest with each other, in a kind way.

He went on to an illustrious career in law, and I went on to a nefarious career in entertainment.  We never lost contact, though we have gone through long dry spells, but friendship has a way of overcoming that.

The conversation ranged over a hundred topics spanning more than an hour.  He mentioned how several folks of his acquaintance were thinking of going the ex-pat route.  Things were out of control in the home country.  We talked art and law and business.  We introduced our wives to each other.  I mentioned how much he looked like his father, who I admired greatly.

Through it all, I thought about the "old days," when we were idealistic and full of passion for the future, back when we weren't so jaded and cynical.

Then I thought about how we were talking.  We were literally on opposite sides of the world speaking in real time with full motion video.  I lost my train of thought for a moment as I pondered this modern miracle.

When he and I were kids, this kind of technology was science fiction.  We marveled at Dr. Floyd calling his daughter from orbit on her birthday, in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Even before that was the comic strip Dick Tracey, with his 2-way wrist radio.  Wow, wouldn't that be cool!  And Star Trek, with their automatic doors and Bluetooth earpieces and electronic tablets that you could write on with a stylus.

My buddy and I grew in simple(r) times.  Phones were big clunky things with rotary dials.  TV was just going color and the NBC peacock was an exciting thing.  Radio dramas were just dying out.  The space age was just being born.  Telecommunications satellites were a new thing and trans-Atlantic calls were wildly expensive.

When I went on my global walk-about at 18, I sent postcards (when I could afford it), and a trans-Atlantic call meant a day at the telegraph office, making an appointment, sitting in a booth with a meter, and waiting 3-5 seconds for replies from the other end.  And that was Europe - North Africa and the Middle East were out of the question, and Asia was a technological wasteland.

In a single lifetime, speaking of my great aunt Tish, folks went from covered wagons (when her family moved to Texas in 1898, to being afraid of comets (Halley in 1910), to super highways and global telephony.

Yes, here I was, talking to my buddy on the East Coast while sitting at the breakfast table in Jakarta, having a real-time vidchat in living color.  And since I was using my tablet (with stylus), I could go out on the patio to smoke and show him some of the fun stuff in Indonesian neighborhoods.  I was daybreak here and just after dinner there.  Dr. Floyd was only 200 miles up in orbit, we were 10,000 miles apart, as the crow flies.

I thought about he and I riding our bicycles on Saturday afternoons down at Buffalo Bayou.  Chevrolet Bellaires were still new cars.  A gallon of gas (not that we needed it) was 27 cents.  The Gemini space program was still amazing stuff.  And there were no home computers or video games or cell phones.  We had to make our own fun.

"What happened to us?" my buddy asked, only partly joking about the sagging jowls and fading eye-sight.  "Gravity," I said.  We traded health-related crises and our various "procedures," a la Billy Crystal's brilliant speech in City Slickers.

We parted with vague threats to "do this more often."

"More often," I thought, "It's a miracle we can do it at all."

All Alone In The Moonlight

Labor Day is the unofficial New Year's Day in America.  No one actually refers to it as that, and no one really thinks of it like that, but in effect, it is a truly transformative moment when one life ends and another begins.

Dad is drafted into the Attic Patrol to bring down the winter clothes.  Mom starts cleaning the house from stem to stern.  The air itself takes on a magical quality with the sunlight sparkling and just enough break in the heat of summer to cause young creatures to suddenly bolt in all directions at once.  And for a boy of 13, it is the moment he realizes that all his plans and resolutions for the summer months are left unfulfilled with only three days left to make good on his dreams.

And this particular Labor Day weekend, the boy also realizes that it is the end of childhood and that the specter that has been haunting him all summer is named Responsibility.  In three days, he would enter high school and life would never be the same again.

We lived on a farm that year about three miles outside of a bustling metropolis called Moulton, Texas, with an overflowing population of 679.  I always wondered if the ninth person was a widow, because otherwise, someone was going to lose at the Dating Game.

That Saturday morning brought the realization that time was running out.  Not only would the freedom of summer soon come to a crashing halt, but the brutal winter of the Texas hill country was just around the corner.

Determined to enjoy those fading moments of liberty, I made a pack with two bologna sandwiches, an apple and a half-frozen Coca-Cola, grabbed my trusty Browning .22 rifle with boxes of short rounds, and collected my ever-present companions Charlie Brown and Lucy - a pair of Dachshund book-ends - and set off in search of adventure.

First stop was the field behind the house.  It was 20 acres of endless imagination, and there were six of them spread out at my fingertips.  A boy with 125 acres at his disposal was not just a king, but a god.  It was the literal clay from which worlds could be fashioned, populated with creatures of every description, and all of which lived and died by my command.

This field had a small hill at one end and had dirt berms snaking across it, ostensibly to control erosion, but I knew the truth: they were the hiding places of legions of imaginary enemies begging to be vanquished.  It had also just been plowed, liberating great clods of earth that were the building blocks of dreams.

My faithful hounds and I realized the threats hidden behind those berms and we quickly dropped to our bellies behind the hill and carefully wormed our way to the high ground.  Once we obtained the peak, we could spy the legions of mysterious creatures arrayed against us.  Spread all across this alien world, they were milling about on the berms, attending to alien business that was as impenetrable to us as a book of Mandarin faiery tales.

Taking careful aim, I squeezed off a couple of dozen rounds, watching as their alien bodies exploded into great, satisfying puffs of offal.  My faithful hounds waited until the order, then sped across the rough terrain to engage the enemy in hand-to-hand combat.  Their yelps and barks told me that victory was at hand, and I triumphantly leaped to my feet and charged the alien strongholds.

A satisfying victory under our belts, we pressed on to the next adventure.

This one came in the form of a hole.  Not just any hole, but an armadillo hole.  Lucky for me, my trusty hounds were bred for just this sort of adventure, and on cue, they dived beneath the ground with only their joyous voices being heard as if coming from the very stones themselves.

I sought our the back door and waited.  It didn't take long.  Soon enough, the head of a living armored vehicle appeared just in front of me with the sounds of exuberant Dachshunds at its hind-quarters.  When the entire creature had been exposed, I sprang at it like a sunburned leopard, grabbing its tail before it could beat a hasty retreat.

I don't know if you've ever had the chance to examine one of these creatures up close.  From the neck down, they are God's own battle tanks, covered with dense plates of articulated armor, and sporting claws that would frighten any right-minded individual.  From the neck up, though, they were almost comical - small,oval ears twitching to and fro, little brown marbles installed like afterthoughts under a Neanderthal brow ridge, and a long, slender snout with two large nostrils that could be individually steered like chameleon eyes.

After what seemed hours of examination, we released the mysterious creature, who bounded into the tall grass and vanished before our eyes, and forgotten almost as fast.  There were other worlds to conquer!

Next stop was the graveyard for the disintegrating hulks of four Ford Model A cars.  These were ancient relics of some vanished civilization, left to rejoin the earth from which they had emerged.  So old they were, that their wheels had collapsed and their hulks rested belly-down on the ground.  The remaining glass in their windows were fogged like the eyes of old men and any paint that had once glossed their fenders had long since abandoned their posts.  They were now the domain of the biggest, meanest-looking yellow-and-black spiders you would ever want to avoid.

My trusty hounds had stirred a grasshopper into flight, and he flew directly into the web of one of these fearsome aliens.  We hunkered down and watched with battling emotions of fear and fascination as the struggling critter was set upon by the alien.  A lightning-fast bite quickly paralyzed the hapless hopper, and then the alien set about wrapping him with dense threads - turning, turning, turning - until there was hardly anything to identify the victim.  A chill landed at the base of my spine and crept like molasses in January up to the base of my skull and settled in for a session of shivers and involuntary shakes.  We beat a hasty retreat from the sight of this horrific and ignoble end.

It was now time for lunch, and that could only mean one thing - The Twins!

Down by the creek were a pair of the most enormous oak trees I have ever seen.  Easily 50 feet tall with canopies that spanned globes, they stood about 100 feet apart like sentinels at the gates of Heaven.  At the base of one was a sizable limestone boulder, looking as if the roots had squirted it out of the earth at that exact spot, and through some trick of weather and geology, was shaped almost perfectly like an arm chair.  This was my throne, from which I could survey the entirety of my realm.  To one side was the creek, which to me was not just a creek, but actually a mighty raging river cutting through my kingdom thousands of feet below.  To the other side were the vast fields and hills of my domain.  I dined upon great hunks of roasted beast and swilled the wine of victory.  I cast my crumbs to my faithful hounds and issued forth new laws upon the land.

When I had supped and rested, I tossed the Coca-Cola can across the great canyon and imagined it to be the citadels of infidels.  I squatted down behind my throne, took careful aim, and laid waste to the usurpers who dared to impose on my domain.

In those times, there were eternities in a moment.  Life was anything I imagined and freedom was a constant companion.  Magic filled every molecule of the atmosphere and I could conjure empires of dirt and castles of oak.  Scale was an arbitrary definition that I could expand or contract at will, and I could play any role in my worlds that I chose and my faithful hounds would drop instantly into role at my command.  I was man, king and god.  I held the power of life and death in my hand.  But it was all like grasping at water - at once tangible and ephemeral - as real as my throne and as fleeting as morning mist.