Saturday Odyssey

On Saturday mornings in September and October I would often wake up early and meet up with two or three friends to have breakfast. There was a Walgreen's near my house and at the time Walgreen's had a soda fountain and grill connected to their drugstore. They served a "breakfast special" 2 eggs, bacon, home fries, toast and coffee for only 59 cents. I was smoking back then, at the age of 13, and usually, after one of these fine breakfasts, I would get a coffee to go and have it outside the store with my cigarette. It's almost impossible to recapture the sensory rush of smoking a cigarette with a steaming cup of coffee on a cool September or October morning.

What was best about Saturdays at this time of life, and younger, was that the day, unencumbered by school, or church, or Sunday dinner, was an 8- or 9-hour Odyssey. If you started out around 8:00 in the morning, you found yourself by 4:00 in the afternoon at a place you could not have foreseen. The location was unimportant: maybe you were at the stores, or in the park playing football, or helping a friend rake leaves, or walking home from the woods or those fields I had once burned down. The fascinating part was trying to recall how you got there, realizing how many different stories, and connections with different kids or people and changes had occurred since early in the day, the less eventful spots already nearly forgotten, discarded from the narrative, or maybe kept for the purpose of transition to a more eventful scene---say, an hour or two with a girlfriend.

 

Like in the Spring, the air and light by late afternoon had taken on a mystical quality, which made the concatenation of scenes and experiences and sensations (and the linking of scenes), made the recollected Saturday Odyssey all the more compelling, all the more transcendent and mysterious. And years later, with any random play of light and shadow, or a change of season, or a stray sound or a smell, a gesture even, we return to the old places once again. We never really leave them, do we?