It's Patriotic

We, as people and minds, don’t choose what memories we retain and which ones we discard. We have some influence on what is ‘important’ to our minds, but ultimately, what gets kept and what gets thrown away is up to our subconscious. Looking into your memories can lead to confusion, elation, sadness, and intense nostalgia. It is often a mystery why our subconscious chooses to cling to these moments. In the next pages, I’ll be recounting an event in my memory in which all of my sensory functions were functioning perfectly for some reason, and over time, I have grown quite fond of. In fact, I wouldn’t be lying if I told you it was one of my most treasured memories.

I was at a very classy, totally atypical high school gathering at a friends house in Spring Lake. Of course, the parents were home and we went to bed at a reasonable time and all that. It was toward the end of the summer vacation we students of the U.S.A. are blessed with. The specific moment that is crystallized in my mind forever took place toward the winding down of the night. Some people had gone outside and were sitting on the porch and some on the trampoline adjacent to the house. It had a few small holes in it (presumably from cigarettes and such contraband), but other than that, it was a pretty solid trampoline. Some others were walking around in the road, recounting moments from earlier in the night and reminiscing about similar nights from the past, kind of like I am now. The feeling of calm, warm, friendliness swept over the area and tucked it inside a kindness blanket, if you will.

I remember thinking about how contradictory this was to the usual happenings of a winding-down, house party. “There’s always the one kid no one knows, who was invited by the half-invited weird kid to begin with; The kid who snaps for, consistently, unknown reasons, ruining that peaceful twilight kind of feel for everyone else. Like when that kind of heavier girl started throwing cheese balls all over the garage and shouting gibberish that one time,” I thought to myself. ’ I looked around at all the smiling faces and half-asleep eyes; they were the kind of eyes we all get when theres something just -good- happening and they’d love to stay up and see it all unravel, but the sandman has other plans. And he has a fuzzy blanket...and a cozy bed ready to be slept in. Those eyes. The warm, late-summer night breezes kissed those eyes shut, like a mother putting her children to bed. The rest of us who weren’t afflicted with the sleepy-eyes felt the breeze as a reminder that the night wasn’t getting any younger.

Somehow a red concert frisbee had made its way into the group of people strolling around the street aimlessly. If you were looking at the group in an airplane, you’d probably see a red blood cell flying across the road, disappearing and reappearing down the road and cross again, in a peek-a-boo kind of manner. Another odd thing I noticed that just added to the serenity of the scene (and you may not believe me, but I swear) not one person dropped that frisbee. Not that it would have ruined the night, but it’s just one of those things that is nice to have happen. “You have to enjoy the little things,” they always say.

Finally, One of the members of this band of street-walkers made a B-line for the house. No one asked what his purpose was, but he came back with the american flag. It was the kind of american flag that you stick on the side of your house -the ones that with the white pole about baseball bat length-. I had possession of the frisbee as he came under the street light that was working. The lights on both sides of this one were off for the time being. Then he almost whispered a command to me, “Dude, toss it.” He cocked back the flag and choked up his grip. My brain took a few moments to process the intention of me tossing the frisbee to him. He gestured with the flag, “right here...” he said with the most austere face you could imagine someone with that idea in mind. That’s when my brain finally caught up. I cautioned “I don’t know if the is really unpatriotic or really patriotic,” quite unsure of releasing the disc. But this look of sincerity I was being exposed to assured me more than any number of scientists or government officials could, had they been standing in rows along the potential flight path, nodding their heads. Not only that, but as I was ready to glide the frisbee over to its eminent demise, he uttered some unforgettable words that will be ingrained in my brain forever; “Oh, it’s patriotic as f$#k,” he spoke with the same look he had given me earlier on his face.

You’d think it’d be extremely difficult to get a solid connection with a disc floating on its side by swinging a rod horizontally, but this young man made it look like it was his job. The connection couldn’t have been better, even if the Babe practiced swinging at frisbees in his spare time.

 The slain frisbee landed at my feet. Now, sometimes, you can’t explain why you take such joy in things, they just give a childlike sense of happiness; a raw kind of, reptilian joy, and that is what felt in that moment. I felt so...content. I laughed a little and smiled warmly. I decided to leave it there after having asked myself,
‘What better way to go out for a frisbee is there?’