Golf Balls and Skybirds ...or the moments of a road trip mind

Along The Dover Road, between New York City and Virginia Beach, we tumble through Salisbury...the last place my brother called home. As we pass through, I notice–– as I did in August, the first time I'd been through in nearly nine years–– the growth of the little roadside stop. Well, the academic in me wants to call it sprawl, but most folks draw lines with progress and clutter...the expanded Wal Mart, the chain restaurants, and the new chain gas stations all replacing the single owned ones known along the area for subs and fried chicken. 

Somewhere along the way my mind remembers golf balls and rides in his partner's blue pick up truck. Those...those are memories for me to hold onto for another day.  Perhaps like the skybirds (Skybirds http://coolerthanyoustupidthings.blogspot.com/2009/08/skybirds.html) of my youth.  I still wonder what those are, then again I doubt that I really need to unearth that.

This past February made ten years since my brother passed. A decade. A few years ago I jotted some here (It’s That Time of Year http://coolerthanyoustupidthings.blogspot.com/2009/02/its-that-time-of-year.html), and I don't feel the deep power to rehash traumas a decade old. I will say that as I look back on it sometimes the scope of life and seeing how we've gone on startles me. In many ways it doesn't feel like ten years, in other ways–– as the cliche holds–– it feels like so long ago. In terms of technolgy and life it was before smart phones became common, text messaging the preferred form of communication, before tablets (like I write from now), before book deal one through three, and long before Facebook captivated the world and Instagram made visual beauties available at mobile fingertips.

That little roadside town will always longer as a cloudy spot in my memory, often avoided. Yet, skybirds and golf balls in fields now covered with chain stores serve as a metaphorical blanket of comfort to ease the moments that alter our trajectory. Similar to what my friend Geoff recently said, we spend much of or life remembering those who have already passed through and the reminders of them serve as a comfort of what was and what we have now become.