just because

We sat in the middle of the street…we could do that.. it was a small quiet town.. all of our neighbors were still in bed.  it was pre -dawn.. that magical part of the day where the automatic street lights had just turned off and the world was bathed in a soft hue that you almost had to squint your eyes to see anything.

I was sitting with my best buddy, Steve.  I had just helped him finish delivering the Sunday morning paper to all of our neighbors. This was something  that I had been helping him with. We were unlikely friends, yet, somehow we had become very close.  It started a few months back. Of our usual group of kids that we walked home from the bus stop, it happened to just be the two of us. Akwardly, we started talking. And boy did we talk.  By the time we reached his street I asked him is he wanted to come over for a soda and to watch some MTV ( we had just got cable and I was a budding Bruce Springsteen junkie) .  he explained that he could not, because he had a paper route and this was a delivery day. I offered to walk with him so that we could keep talking, and well, it became a habit. We had so much to talk about. it’s not like I didn’t have girlfriends to talk to, I did… but with my girlfriends I talked about make-up, and clothes, and  girl-type of stuff…. with Steve, I talked about deeper kinds of things.. the meaning of life, so to speak. An unlikely pair, yes, but still such good honest friends… the kind of friend who would tell me like it was, like it or not.

“you’re moving to CAPE COD?  like out in the middle of the ocean?”

” it’s not in the middle of the ocean… just closer than we are here”

” You do realize that when you get a storm there you house washes out to sea.. are you ready to be floating towards Europe?’

” I’m not going  to end up floating towards Europe, silly” I scrunched my nose up and used my pointer finger to point the squishy end of his nose in .. ” Only the houses on the ocean are at risk for that.. the really rich houses.. we won’t be living like that… you know that !”

” but still… do you realize that you will be living in tourist central?”

” Really, it’s not that bad.. it’s just another small town. Remember, I went to visit my aunt and uncle back awhile ago? it’s just a small town… they really like hockey there. I could learn to like hockey”

” you mean when you fell through the roof of your uncles house down two stories and ended up in the basement?’

” um.. yes… but that could have happened to anyone… don’t you think?”

he looked at me like he could see right down to my toes…

” do you really believe that?”

again, I scrunched my nose… years later I  would realize that this was a habit of mine , at this point I was just watching the sun come up and seeing the sadness in his eyes…

” yeah.. kinda?’