​Let’s see now, it must have been about 1993. I’m pretty sure, because it was not too long after we bought the house, and very shortly after I started using a daily dose of fiber laxative. These are milestones to remember, I hope you understand.
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My morning ritual had been pretty much the same over that decade or so. I’d get up, heat my cup of water, add the homemade coffee concentrate that I favored, grab the newspaper, and head down to the basement bathroom.

​The summer afternoon was dark with threatening weather. Through intermittent storms, a young fellow named Chris was driving his little brother to a summer camp. This was not what he expected to be doing, right now. He had expected to instead be in a college auditorium with a few thousand other people, enjoying a live music festival for local bands.
 
For his girlfriend’s eighteenth birthday, her dad had given her six tickets to the music festival, and a limo with driver to take them to and from. She had chosen two friends and their boyfriends; they would go as three couples. Two days before the event, one of the friends broke up with her boyfriend. After some discussion, they decided to make it a ladies’ night out, invited three more female friends, and cut Chris and the other remaining boyfriend out of the plan.
 

The sidewalk was old, unkempt, and uneven. Weeds grew in the divides between concrete sections. Most of those sections were cracked and tilted in various directions and at varying angles. He was aware that it went on this way for many blocks ahead, as it had for the many that he’d already put behind him. Most of the yards, and many of the houses that they fronted, appeared to be as worn and neglected as the sidewalk. Even the tall trees looked tired, though they retained the dignity that is their birthright. 

Water around the hull of his kayak was black with highlighted ripples, under fading light from the western horizon. Directly over his head, the arch of the sky glimmered with patches of emerging starlight. The eastern shoreline of the small lake, there a few hundred yards in front of him, was already cloaked in shadows. The sky above the tall trees on the hill was only a slightly deeper shade of dark. Between treetop shadows and the shoreline, a few dim lights from windows of summer cabins emphasized the darkness of the approaching moonless night.​

​He could see her in the window of the apartment across the court from his. Regal, she was. Sleek and beautiful, a little bit exotic. And, it was obvious that she was aware of her own great beauty.
 
Every evening he would watch her, preening, stretching her limbs as a dancer might do just before a performance. Sometimes, it was as if she was aware of him watching, as he smiled at her beauty and her narcissistic posturing.  He wondered if her hair was as soft as it appeared, or if her voice was as sultry as her attitude. She would often stare in his direction, across the space of the inner court between their two buildings, and there were times that he imagined she’d seen and smiled at him.

​The cat was there every morning, not always in the same place, but somewhere along my three block walk to the bus stop. One day it would be on the front step or sidewalk of some random one of the houses that were set back from the sidewalk. On another day it would be sitting on the trunk of a car parked in one or another of the driveways. Some days, the cat would approach to within a dozen feet, and would walk a path parallel to mine. Some others it would walk a zig-zag path on the sidewalk ahead of me, looking over its shoulders at me each time it turned, on others it would follow loosely along behind until I was near the bus stop sign. Always, it would talk to me as we walked or as I passed it by.
 

​He leaned forward with his forearms on steel pipe railing, listening to the low chuckles and gurgles of the stream below. Black water with twinkling highlights flowed toward him and beneath the bridge deck. After contemplating that gentle sound for a few moments, he grasped the fob in his pants pocket and locked the car he’d parked just off the road to his left beside the small bridge. He turned, and began a slow walk in the other direction.
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​The daydream faded in gentle and amusing fashion. I began to notice what my eyes were doing, again. Hmm. Windshield, moving landscape. Oh, shit! I’m driving. Where did I zone out? Where the hell am I, now?

Sitting up straighter for a moment, I lean forward to peer out through the windshield, trying to see any upcoming signs that would tell me how far I’d travelled without noticing. Damn! I need to turn the vent on my face, and the radio. I’ll turn on the radio to keep me from remembering those things that never happened, again. Deep breath, sit back.

​In the distance, sound. Low drone of a household furnace that labors against post-dawn chill. Reluctant eyes blink, open to pale light of overcast through frosted window. Awake. Damn. Legs twist around to put feet on floor, pause with elbows on knees, head in hands. Resentment and a full bladder complete the clearance of waking fog.

“Where did they go? We were about to leave, now they’re just, gone.”
 
I began to panic a bit, and to dart among the groups of revelers in between the entertainment venues, looking for the people that were my ride home. I thought to reach for my phone, and realized I’d no idea where to reach. I touched my back pocket…no wallet, either. I couldn’t recall where they might be. I continued the internal discussion.

“What the hell? Wait, I asked, uh, what’s-his-name to keep an eye on my wallet, but why? Why didn’t I just keep it? Why ask him? Why don’t I remember his name?”