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In the evenings, we would walk to Historic, taking only cigarettes, and maybe an extra shirt. We never brought a flashlight. Four, or seven, or ten of us, always together. Sometimes there was a destination, sometimes we just roved. Walking among the skeleton timber buildings, sentinels of another time, we didn't always talk. Our crunching footsteps took us, inevitably, towards the river. Scrambling down a bank, I felt like someone much younger. A kid who had found a private place behind a housing development, where trees hid a culvert where the air was cool and the trees blocked out the sounds of traffic. Down at the river, there was no need for sound barriers. There were no sounds to hide. The insect night swelled loud in our ears. Phosphorescent algae glowed red and green at the shore line. Someone might throw a handful of sand to make the lights flare up. If the moon was behind clouds, all we could see of one another would be a half dozen glowing tips of ash from cigarettes that kept the mosquitoes at bay. We almost never went swimming. The jellyfish would cover you with gossamer filaments of microscopic poisonous barbs. They hurt like hell. We'd light a joint and talk and talk and talk. I have no idea about what. We were happy and young and full of opinions. We had the best intellectual quarrels, our ideas limber and nineteen-year-old brains popping with energy. We'd sit out there, at the end of the earth, and let the salty air and heavy vegetable air do it's magic. It was a good thing to be part of. I'm afraid of forgetting it. Everything becomes hazy over time. I'm thinking I (we) should not let all those nights get away so easily. Wouldn't it be good to remember, and to remind? Last night, I heard Jeff calling me Red. Hadn't thought about that in years and years. I wonder what our collective memories could dredge up? Would it hurt? Would it work? What do they think about, Lizzie, Calley, Megan, Tim, Josh, Elisha, Cheeky, Duncan, Jeff, Martha...and are they remembering stuff I've already forgotten? People I've forgotten? Where is Ali Beheler? Places we went and all the crazy, hilarious things we did? Just how many times we sang that Padrino song? Sparke? Dylan ad infinitum? It's too much. Too much to forget. Too much to remember. Who needs a drink?