The brown doors of my childhood. The brown floors of my childhood. Sun on
the brown floor of my childhood. Lots of good dark wood, and the fuzzy
carpet, good for driving cars around. The pop songs of my childhood. The
lost toys of my childhood.
     I would like to get to know a neighborhood so well again, and all
its nooks and crannies, as I knew the junipers and pines of my childhood
neighborhood. The curb and the gutter, the rivers in the gutters, the
cracks in the street, the pattern of the lawn, the structure of a leaf,
shredding it on a summer night with Solarcaine all over your sunburn,
your nostrils full of the scent of Solarcaine, feeling like a hotdog.
While the girl across the street talks about your aura, and you try and
see up the pantsleg of her shorts.
     Eat dinner, then wander out of doors and prowl around the dusk of
the neighborhood. The mulberry, magnolia, and cypress. The curbside
chokeberry tree. Maybe we'll get up a game of hidenseek, with rules
agreed upon by the community of children, with its arcane hierarchies and
esoteric alliances. Being there, as it were, closer to the previous
incarnations, you can see it showing through. Mikey, a weak, milky,
asthmatic whiner, was only recently an Ajax-like soldier of great
ferocity in the Great War. Whereas dangerous Johnny with the shifty eyes
was a larcenous young girl in the salons of Europe.