It was summer, although summer still hadn’t really arrived. It was one of those typical summers of your youth, where the heat seemed so tangible and real – as if you could reach out and grasp it as it bounced off the asphalt. Take hold of it and squeeze it between your fingers. Bring it up to your nose to inhale the sticky scent of baked sidewalks and browning grass. It was a summer long ago, when I was still a young pup with no job and no worries.All I wanted to do was rip around town on my Mongoose Expert Pro BMX bike. It was a dull shade of black and had shiny silver parts. Technically it was what one would call a “race bike”, one designed for groomed dirt tracks and skidding down the gravel lane behind your house. I launched mine off of staircases and up curbs. The city was an unexplored jungle to me, just waiting to be picked apart by my discerning eye and knobby rubber tires. I was not yet a teenager, so I was at that beautiful age where the world is exotic and new – I just didn’t realize it. To me that world was going to last my whole life . . . and while it has, it has lasted through the eyes of that boy. Back then a sense of wonderment was hardwired into the very core of my being. It radiated in from the world around me and I marinated in it. I still aspire to protect and enjoy that sense of wonder, but it is not a thing that is innate anymore, it is something that exists due to a conscious effort on my end. And maybe that is just the way things go as we get older. I don’t really know, I’m still figuring this stuff out. But I digress . . .
